Comments on: Refresh in reactive displays

By: Bryan Clark

Bryan Clark — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 22:51:37 +0000

Eric: I think that’s a great idea! I thought that putting it in the tray might get a little annoying and I’m not certain of that yet but it seems that way. What you’re proposing sounds really good, you should send it to the NM list.

Daniel: The reason why the animated scan icon could be annoying in the tray is because at times when you’re out of wireless range NM will keep running scans on it’s own. Assuming you didn’t want to connect to a wireless network or knew there were none available to connect to, having an icon that every 5 minutes turns into this animation for the next minute would get annoying.

Oh and the head icon is mugshot running, see http://mugshot.org/

By: Bryan Clark

Bryan Clark — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 22:48:11 +0000

Maciej: I think you’ve misunderstood. In the situation where you’re coming out of suspend there isn’t anyway to make the wireless card refresh faster. You have to understand the types of refresh, lets call it soft and hard. During use of the wireless network your card is constantly doing a soft refresh to check for new networks. see my above comments on how this works. When you’re coming out of suspend or first booting up the card is doing a hard refresh of the wireless networks.

You have to really take a much better look at the technology and how it works, perhaps it’s my fault that I didn’t explain what’s going on underneath enough to back up these decisions, but it’s pretty complicated and likely why you don’t understand what’s happening.

So here’s an situation where this refresh button easily fails. You have the button pictured above which causes a hard refresh of all the wireless networks, the system is not smart as you say because the user is smart so it will always go into a refresh when you hit this button.

If your card is attempting to connect to a wireless network as you press the refresh button you will break the connection and cause the card to go into a full scan mode. If your card has scanned 1/2 of all the frequencies in your band and your desired AP is in the other half the card will dump it’s scan cache and start from the beginning after the button is hit.

So you can see that already you have to be somewhat smart so the user doesn’t shoot themselves in the foot; I can tell you’re thinking already that we’re trying to be too smart. But we can both agree that you need to give enough feedback so people know when the card is doing something. Then once there is enough feedback to feel like NM isn’t just silent you probably won’t want to use the refresh button because you’ll see that it’s always about to do the right thing.

By: Maciej Pilichowski

Maciej Pilichowski — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:41:19 +0000

Hmm, did I understand that correctly — when the users needs CURRENT data she/he cannot get it right away but actually she/he has to wait until next auto-refresh. Oh boy…
Auto-refresh is useful thing to have but refresh on demand also because of time — user can have things to do and don’t want to waste 2 minutes (?) to see the refreshed list.

Current design is another example of this shameful attitude “our program knows better (than user) what and when the user needs”.

By: Bryan Clark : Scanning for Feedback

Bryan Clark : Scanning for Feedback — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 15:26:39 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Jay Huie

Jay Huie — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 01:30:21 +0000

Bryan,
Thanks for the explanation of UI design. I think sometimes (especially in Linux land) it seems like either black magic, or that someone just threw it together.
I agree with you that some type of “scanning” feedback would be helpful. I like how the bars build as it starts to authenticate (dhcp, etc..) but often I’m left tail -f /var/log/messages to see if it’s going to work, or if my network card’s hung or stuck in an endless cycle.
The lack of a ‘refresh’ has hit me too, when I want to connect to a network that I know’s there but NM hasn’t picked up on it… I’ve often resorted to simply redefining it…. I’m sure that breaks the 1-2 step into something worse then 1-2-3… So there are definitely other ways that people are obscuring the bugs…

By: Daniel

Daniel — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 21:29:08 +0000

I’m wondering if changing the NM icon for that of a radar (maybe animated) when it’s scanning would be something informative and not too much annoying.

By the way, what is the head icon at the right of the NM one?

By: Eric

Eric — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 21:18:55 +0000

What if in the same place as the “Refresh” button in the mockup you posted, there was an animated spinner image?

http://www.napyfab.com/ajax-indicators/images/indicator.gif

On OSX, it is very common to see people constantly opening/closing/reopening the AirPort menu, waiting for networks to show up, because the menu does not automatically refresh. The Wireless Networks dialog in Windows XP also does not automatically refresh.

Letting users know that the NetworkManager list menu does automatically update and does not need to be manually closed/re-opened could make them very happy.

By: Artem Vakhitov

Artem Vakhitov — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 20:47:27 +0000

Brian said: “I know people want it because it would gloss over most of the bugs in NM, but that just leaves the bugs unfixed.”

Sure, I can understand this motivation. But maybe some trade-off is possible? Like, for example, include the Refresh button in the UI, but every time a user clicks it, NM would log all relevant aspects of its state and then send the log to the developers for analysis when the connection is up. That way, users would get the control they want, and developers would receive the feedback they need to fix the remaining bugs. What do you think about it?

By: Anders

Anders — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 20:15:51 +0000

Bryan: Ahh, thanks for explaining. A very interesting read. I’ll shut up for now

By: Bryan Clark

Bryan Clark — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 20:02:19 +0000

Anders: Dan explained this to me this morning because I had never understood it before. A wireless card will send a sleep packet to the AP it’s associated with which causes the AP to buffer incoming packets for the card. The card then buffers any out going packets while it switches channels and listens for activity on other channels; each channel requiring about 100ms. Once the passive scan is completed the card sends a ‘wake’ packet to the AP and they both push through any buffering they’ve been doing. I guess it’s a pretty standard system.

Artem: I know people want it because it would gloss over most of the bugs in NM, but that just leaves the bugs unfixed. As Dan pointed out in his post, we complained early on and stuck to our guns of what we wanted to do with Linux wireless networking and we’re almost there. Just a little further to go.

By: Laurent

Laurent — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 19:51:40 +0000

A quick and dirty alternative to the refresh button would be to start the refresh process when one click the NM icon(?)

By: Artem Vakhitov

Artem Vakhitov — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 19:51:07 +0000

Sigh… I was going to make a feature request for a Refresh button. I thought it’d be better to have it there until NM works 99,99% of time. Which, sadly, isn’t the case for me (and for many other people) currently. Please please add it – maybe not a button, but some other control that would allow me to tell NM “please do scan the available networks now”. Otherwise the users for whom NM doesn’t work are effectively punished

By: Anders

Anders — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 19:21:05 +0000

Bryan: How does the hardware do that? How does the card do a passive scan on another channel, than the one it’s currently tuned in at? I have two problems with it:
1) I have never seen a Linux-laptop show networks on other channels while attached to a network – but maybe I’m just unlucky.
2) I can’t wrap my head around how a single-radio card can listen on two channels simultaneously – which must be needed for uninterrupted wlan on one channel and a passive scan on another channel.

By: Bryan Clark

Bryan Clark — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 18:53:01 +0000

Blizzard: There’s an issue if you’re actively looking for a new network that you might want to know if NM is still scanning or has scanned everything and what it shows is all that’s available. A little feedback about if it’s scanning or not should relate how old the information is.

Anders: That sounds like a driver issue, it really has nothing to do with NM. Network Manager would send a request for a passive scan while you’re associated to a wlan, however if your driver is broken it won’t honor that request and you’ll have to un-associate.

Stephane: I have some mockups of how to not always connect to networks like that. I was planning on posting them soon. http://www.gnome.org/~clarkbw/designs/network-manager/

By: Stephane Chauveau

Stephane Chauveau — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 18:35:46 +0000

An alternative to the refresh button could be an entry such as “More …” at the end of the list of networks.

That entry would open a dialog window with some advanced features such as :
– a refresh button.
– hide/show the networks in the applet list and prevent/allow automatic login. I once logged by mistake on my neighbor’s unprotected network and after that NM would automatically choose it by default. I think that I had to manually remove the keys in gconf. Annoying!
– prioritize the available networks (e.g. chose my high speed private network instead of my low speed guest hotspot).
– manage the stored password (clear, show, …).
– show the encryption protocol and the channel for each network.

By: Anders

Anders — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 17:49:49 +0000

A refresh button is actually the single thing I miss the most from networkmanager. It’s really annoying that you can’t see networks on other channels when it’s logged onto a wlan.

The list of networks on the _current_ channel is useless.

By: Christopher Blizzard

Christopher Blizzard — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 16:05:59 +0000

Can we tell how old the data is? Can we just say “20 seconds old” or “2 minutes old” or something? That might lead to someone asking for a refresh button, though.