26Oct / 2007

Managing your Wireless Networks

Last post about Network Manager for a little while, I swear…

The current state of Network Manager doesn’t allow you to easily manage the wireless access points that you connect to and how it connects to them. NM also doesn’t allow you to easily stop it from auto-switching from wireless to wired networks when you connect a wired cable. We explicitly avoided a “manager” style interface for the smother and simpler auto connection interactions we currently have. However we haven’t been allowing people to control NM in certain normal cases where the auto connection system breaks.

Window Shopping

The use case we’re failing at right now in regards to managing your wireless networks is what I like to call Window Shopping or “Just looking”. At a conference or a coffee shop it’s very normal to attempt to connect to a number of networks, often to see if they are working and fast or free! After connecting, or not connecting, to these networks it doesn’t take long to realize that you’ve connected to something that isn’t going to work. However Network Manager doesn’t have the same realization as you, it remembers that network and will try to connect to it again next time if there isn’t a MRU network in range.

Since this case presents mostly an “inline” mistake to the way NM is choosing networks it seems to make the most sense to employ an inline interaction to handle those mistakes. Inline, in this sense, meaning that you don’t want to require people to manage the networks outside of when NM makes a mistake and chooses the wrong one; like only having a right click menu to open the network preferences dialog. Here’s some mockups to explain more.

Most people will see this when they connect to a wired network.

People who turned off auto-wired connecting would see this notification.

People who turned off auto-connect on a particular wireless, like rh-wireless, would see this notification.

Most people would see this notification as they auto connect to their particular wireless network. The buttons look really bad! Please leave comments for ideas on better ways to handle this.

Update: Just to note that the default behavior of Network Manager isn’t changing with these notifications, it is still going to behave in the same automatic way. However the new notifications add support for changing it’s automatic behavior.

Network Preferences…

This is supposed to open up a network preferences dialog. Most likely one tab for wired and one tab for wireless, the wireless tab allowing you to edit networks you use and possibly properties of the wireless behavior. Dan asked for a wired tab, I’m not sure what the properties will be on that dialog… they are likely to be scary enough to make me puke.

Don’t auto-connect again / Always auto-connect

So this isn’t a great way to phrase things. There are two scenarios, you’ve auto-connected to a wireless network you connected to once but didn’t mean to OR you’ve connected to a wireless network manually that you told NM never to auto-connect to. Essentially what I wanted to say for scenario one was: “Don’t automatically connect to this network again” – but that’s a large button. And for scenario two I wanted to say: “Despite how I changed this wireless to manual mode I want you to always auto-connect to it from now on”.

I should mention the wired is a slightly different case from the wireless. It’s more like saying, “Don’t auto-switch me to wired from wireless when I connect the cable”.

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23Oct / 2007

places that make me smile

Is It Christmas?
I check it daily, it even has an RSS feed…
Passive Aggressive Notes
Ever had roommates? You’ll love this
The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks
“funny” stuff in this “blog”

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18Oct / 2007

Is it getting colder?

Looks like 2007 could be a turn for the better with regards to global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters.

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17Oct / 2007

3 out of 6 users prefer software mixing

In a slightly unscientific poll I attempted find out what users prefer, Hardware Sound Mixing or Software Sound Mixing.

Here is a GNOME user enjoying Hardware Sound Mixing, he looks happy and carefree.

Here is a GNOME user enjoying Software Sound Mixing, he also looks happy and carefree.

Thus the toss up, users seem to prefer each type just as much. One could say a lot of users (people who listen to music) don’t care where the sound gets mixed, in hardware or software, just that it does. Andrew got to the point that if you saw the pulse audio demo at the GNOME Summit you’d have been impressed, it allows us to be really reactive and dynamic with sound where we haven’t at all before; a huge step forward that’s available now.

I think Lennart’s mail while long and possibly abrasive to some people was pretty refreshing and right on at the same time. Right now we seem to be at a situation where audio sucks for most of our users all of the time because there is no mixing happing and no integration at the GNOME level. Things suck almost as much for people with hardware mixing because they have to go search the web for a solution to use their hardware mixer at the ALSA level. PA seems like it will at least bring GNOME forward for the majority of users who are likely having issues with sound, working to make hardware mixing work just as well seems like an parallel process, not a conflicting one.

And there’s no reason we couldn’t do much better than the vista sound mixer, we try. I’ve already gotten started and will need to post more mockups as I have them.

[Picture by Flickr user Fanboy30, used under a CC-BY-SA-NC license.]

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17Oct / 2007

Scanning for Feedback

Yesterday morning on the bus I was talking to Dan and asked if Network Manager could export a signal when it is actively searching for networks. As I mentioned in the previous post and many people pointed out in the comments that we need some feedback when the wireless card is actively looking for new networks. The situation where this happens most often is a laptop resuming from a suspend. When the laptop wakes Network Manager clears it’s AP list and starts scanning channels filling the fresh list. As it finds new networks and fills the AP list NM doesn’t tell the UI (nm-applet) that it is actively searching for new networks. Often the only feedback that the user receives is when NM finds a network it knows and begins to connect to it.

To improve this scenario we need some real user feedback during the scan process. I don’t think using an animated icon to show that NM is scanning is necessary, I think it might actually make things a little too busy.

Currently NM will display this “network disconnected” icon even while the wireless is actively scanning.

network disconnected

Instead lets try to use a simple static icon that indicates wireless is active and working. (something like this, my icons are not to be trusted…)

wireless actively searching

In addition to the icon, it might be good to display some kind of message in the applet menu stating “Scanning for New Networks”

Ideas? Leave them in the comments!

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16Oct / 2007

Refresh in reactive displays

In the web world every browser needs a refresh button because the main protocol (http) doesn’t allow for the web browser client to know if there were changes made on the remote end. Lots of MacGyver like fixes using AJAX are built to accommodate the fact that the web is stateless and yet we use it for almost everything even though it’s probably not the best protocol out there, just the most pervasive. The lack of state change events coming from the remote http server makes the system non-reactive and the user interface becomes a static copy of what we asked the server for, thus we have to refresh and poll the server for changes.

When the system behind the user interfaces are reactive the user interface should be a dynamic representation of the system and thus a refresh/reload system doesn’t actually make much sense, and in fact it can be a bad thing. Take the mockup below as an example, it’s the NetworkManager applet with a refresh button packed tightly into the menu. (this is not a good thing)

bad idea

A refresh button like this is tempting for people to add to the interface because it might help work around some of the networking bugs current Linux systems have. However a button like this is not helpful for everyone, it actually erodes away at the experience of NetworkManager (NM).

Reactive Back end

Network Manager is controlling the wireless card in your computer to scan for new networks when most appropriate, finding new networks as they become available. Both types of scanning, passively and actively, are governed by Network Manager in order to be friendly to the access points and wireless networks around you as well as give you the most up to date list of available networks. So NM effectively acts as the proxy to the polling system that happens in your wireless card, delivering a stateful display.

Because NM is providing this kind of reactive back end to wireless networking our display interface (nm-applet) can be fairly simple since everything is just a dynamic representation of what’s out there. Assuming NM is working as it should be the list of networks shown in the applet is always going to be the full list of available networks. Using a refresh button on this kind of dynamic display starts to change that view.

Putting You to work

Since our interface is assuming that NM is always presenting us with all the available networks there is no need for a refresh button. It’s actually just making you work a little more when that work should be inside of NM itself. The one-two step interaction of clicking on the applet to view the wireless networks and then choosing from the available networks becomes a two-three(-repeat) step system where you have to open the applet and click refresh (because you can’t be certain anymore that the applet is showing the correct list), then opening the applet again to see what changes.

Why is it a bad thing to have a refresh button in a reactive display? Because it creates an unneeded inconsistency in the interface. When you look at the mockup above you can’t know if those networks are all that are available… until you hit the refresh button. The refresh button creates an inconsistency by making you think there’s extra work to be done before you can assume there are no other wireless networks. Without the refresh button you have to assume there are no more networks available, of course there’s no way of knowing if NM is looking for more networks or not (more on that below).

Where things go wrong…

Most of the issues in this area of wireless networking on Linux come from systems not telling NM to suspend, sadly your distro is somewhat responsible for making this happen. There are lots of other possible problems through the whole stack from wireless tools to driver support that can make things not work well. But in the end the fixes need to go down into the networking stack to instead of up in the user interface.

Aren’t we still missing something?

So where did we go wrong? Feedback. (often the right answer in interaction design)

The Network Manager applet does lack in user visible feedback during an active scan. When you don’t have a network, either after booting up or resuming, you don’t know if network manager is scanning for new networks. I’m usually left wondering what it’s doing until it connects to something. It would make sense to have some kind of feedback in the applet that indicates it’s currently scanning for wireless networks while you don’t have one (scanning while you are connected to a network isn’t that interesting).

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11Oct / 2007

Halloween-top

Iconfactory released another set of cool Halloween Icons into their freeware collection. This years is much better than last years litho series.

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11Oct / 2007

Much better Gimp cropping

I just upgraded my system a bit last night and wanted to grab the new version of Gimp. I’m now using version 2.4.0-rc3 and so far I am really pleased, the number one thing that stood out for me initially was the new cropping system.

The Gimp image cropping interface may not be that exciting for most people (likely an understatement), but for someone like me who uses it everyday it’s pretty important to not suck.

More direct manipulation

The first thing you’ll notice in the new cropping interface is that the old two corners can resize and two corners can move system is gone. Previous Gimp versions allowed the bottom right and top left corners of the crop sizer to adjust the vertical and horiztonal sizes while the top right and bottom left corners could only move the crop area around. I’m pretty certain I got the orientation of those corners correct without even looking back because it was such a quirk to using the system that you had to know it.

Instead of the extremely small corner resizers and movers on opposing sides you now have much larger corner resizers on all four corners. These resize elements appear when you hover over the crop area. Moving the crop area can be done from anywhere in the middle by clicking and dragging the mouse, indicated by the familiar move mouse icon.

Also a totally new element is resizing from sides, not just corners! Are you bored yet? Amazingly I’m not! So I don’t have to worry about resizing both the vertical and horizontal edges at the same time. Usually I start a crop zoomed out a bit sizing it coarsely with the corners sizers and when things get down to the finer pixel level I’ll zoom in to get the crop just right, this is when you don’t want to have to worry about changing the vertical or horiztonal edge by accident while trying to get the correct adjacent edge.

Less dialogs

The other part that’s really great is that there’s no dialog for the crop tool. It was always murphy’s law for my gimp usage that whenever I was cropping something the dialog would enjoy popping up directly over the area I needed to see in order to finish the crop. Standard procedure meant that you’d stop cropping the image, try to move the dialog away from the image window and continue. I would usually move the dialog almost off the screen so it wasn’t in the way, which was a bonus when I was done because I’d have to try to find the dialog again in order to hit the crop button. Now I just hit enter, there’s a hint at the bottom of the Gimp window.

Improvements

The only thing lacking from the new system was a more obvious way to let me know how to make the crop happen. I had to look around a little bit to find the “Click or press enter to crop” message at the bottom. I’m not sure of what the more obvious way is, but with some experimenting I think you could find a way to place something unobtrusively on the image window that says what to do. I’m sure it’s been tried.

I’ve yet to explore much more, but I’m sure there are lots of other nice new things. Now if only the layering system would get an upgrade…

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09Oct / 2007

they makin’ me sekur

With the help of several other people (a group design!) from this years Boston GNOME Summit. I was finally able to rework one of the important dialogs many update applications suffer from. I think the end result is more fun, intuitive, and thus probably more secure.