[162] in Athena User Interface
Re: Revised plan for printing GUIs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Mon Jun 12 22:11:53 2000
Message-Id: <200006130211.WAA21252@No-Whammies.mit.edu>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
Cc: cfox@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2000 22:11:46 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
> Before this you should talk about drag and drop printing (it seems
> like you just forgot to). "the file" is not yet defined.
Ok, added the following:
The general idea is that users can "drag" arbitrary
files from the Gnome file manager and Gnome-aware applications and
"drop" them on the applet in the panel....
In any case, the applet will determine a "dropped" file's type, decide
whether to print interpreted document or source code, depending on
user configuration, and dispatch to the appropriate action:
> Note that the MIME-related functions in gnome-libs are being
> deprecated in favor of the (nearly identical) MIME-related functions
> in gnome-vfs for 2.0.
I assume we're sticking with 1.2 stuff anyway, at least for the
prototype? Should I note all this in the printing plan, or should I
just let the implementor worry about it?
> Are you sure that "Make choice persistent" is a button and not a
> check box?
Fixed.
> > * PRINT JOB TRACKING *
> >
> > We will create an applet for users to track print jobs once
> > they've been sent to the queue. It will be launched after a DND
> > print request by default.
> Are you sure that you want a seperate capplet?
Well, re-thinking the way users should access to the various bits:
* Printing configuration
- From right-clicking panel applet
- From job tracker
- From Gnome menus
* Printjob tracker
- Pops up automatically by default when DND printing
- From Gnome menus
* From printing configuration
(I could add the last in the form of a new button.)
Actually, might it make more sense to make the job tracker and the
printing configurer two tabs on the same capplet?
>> [Show all known jobs for beland]
>> [Show all jobs for printer...]
>> [Show all jobs on all printers
>> with known jobs for beland]
> How are the first and third choices different?
The first only shows beland's jobs on all printers, whereas the third
shows everybody's jobs on all the printers I have jobs waiting on. If
I have jobs on all the printers in W20, the third would show me all
print jobss for the entire cluster, whereas I might only want to see
my jobs on those printers.
Perhaps a better way to make the same selection would be:
( ) Show only jobs owned by beland
( ) Show only jobs on printer: (pulldown)
both off by default.
>> "beland" should be set by $USER or some similar mechanism.
> There is a standard glib way of doing this.
Ok...how should I note that, if at all?
> You should point out that the lpr wrapper will mean that (nearly)
> every job will be successfully tracked.
Hopefully. Though I know a lot of people running old SIPB
Linux-Athena boxes at home for which this won't work. But they have a
hard time printing now anyway. 8)
> Do you mean "Will automatically log out" or do you mean "Will
> automatically cancel jobs"?
I mean "Will automatically log out" (without cancelling jobs). Do
people think this is the correct behavior? I could change this to:
"Will do nothing and log out in: 30 seconds" if that is clearer?
> Are you sure that you want a "Show this dialog again" checkbox?
Actually, I was just guessing that would be the right thing. What do
people think?
Personally, I'd like to be able to turn it off, but it doesn't
necessarily have to be easy. However, there are no dialog boxes
nearby to hide this option in, so I just put it right there in the
bottom corner.
I'm linking the consolidated document into the components chart in the
project notebook. You can check the following URL for that:
http://web.mit.edu/aui/notebook/components.html
And this one for the printing plan (linked from above):
http://web.mit.edu/aui/notebook/print-control.txt
-B.
