October 26
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”.
That question seems totally unnecessary to me. Network Manager could have the same realization as you. NM could just require a certain number of bytes to be transferred before it autoconnects to a network again.
In the spirit of making things “just work”, I’d like an extra button in the WEP password dialog in addition to “Cancel” and “Login”, called “Crack” – and use aircrack-ng or similar to bypass WEP altogether
Please don’t add an extra click every time you connect to a network. Getting rid of those notification popups is really quite annoying, and this particular one is useless _nearly always_
Ubuwu: Interesting idea, NM doesn’t watch traffic at all right now and we’ve tried to be really smart about things like this before and it often ends up being confusing to people. The MRU algorithm works well most of the times, however it doesn’t allow you to never connect to a network again.
nona: Agreed! I’ve asked for this several times!
Rob: it’s not adding an extra click. NM still performs the same way it always does, however these buttons allow the option to alter it’s behavior after it’s done something.
(Note to Bryan: escape your comment input!)
However the auto-connect options are worded, this is how I will read them:
[ <3 this network! ] -OR- [ This network fails D: ]
So maybe something like:
[ Configure... ] [ Prefer this network ]
[ Configure... ] [ Don't prefer this network ]
I think ‘Configure’ sounds way less crappy than ‘Network Preferences’. I mean, those settings aren’t optional after I set them; If NM bugs out and ignores them, I’m not going to say “well, those were just my /preferences/… I don’t care /that/ much.”
I would suggest creating a checkbox with the label “Auto-connect”. Depending on whether NM always auto-connects for some wired/wireless network, this checkbox has a corresponding state.
Could n-m also add configuration dialog (Maybe like “Advanced configuration” or something if it’s not “user friendly”) that lets us see the list of remembered networks and add/remove them and possibly mess with remembered passwords and such? Network-manager has gotten quite confused for me in the past and cleaning things out with gconf is very unpleasant.
A lot of those auto-connect features are great and all, but I think they are too unforgiving to mistakes. If someone accidentally marks some network or changes their mind, it takes a lot of work to remove it. I don’t think this is desirable behavior.
Plus, such a UI will probably be necessary anyway to support auto-recognizing of hidden networks. (Unless you want for any hidden network to be automatically added to a list to check for which seems quite silly.) And that really should be fixed because typing in all the details every time is a huge pain. Especially since the “Connect to Other Wireless Network” dialog does not auto-detect anything about the access point, and so I have to select the flavor of WPA, and everything each time. Somewhat annoying.
epiphany/evolution thinks am offline while am connected using adsl, this is because NM! can you fix it?
Isn’t it better idea to change don’t autoconnect / always autoconnect button into checkbox “autoconnect to this network”? This way, teh text cen be longer also, because it is not button, but just checkbox label.
If a button is used, clicking on the button logically will dismiss the notification popup. If you use a checkbox, it logically would not dismiss the popup. So while you may solve one problem, you create another by requiring an extra click to dismiss the popup.
I thought the same as onox and Jakub, use a checkbox instead of a button.
Also replaced “Network preferences…” by “More options…” in button,
because the button looks to me like a continuation of the check box option.
Also I made these poor-man mockups for how the pop-ups could look like
(there woul be just two of them, not four). They’ll surely look bad with this
proportional font, though.
Wired case:
——————————————————————
| Connected to Wire X |
| |
| You are now connected to the wired network |
| EFGH |
| |
| [v] Auto-switch to this wire next time |
| |
| [More preferences...] |
——————————————————– ———
\/
Wireless case:
——————————————————————
| Connected to Wireless X |
| |
| You are now connected to the wireless network |
| XYZT |
| |
| [v] Auto-connect next time |
| |
| [More preferences...] |
——————————————————– ———
\/
I might be totally wrong in these things, of course. After all my only
network connection at home is an old-fashioned 56 Kbps modem
(not handled by NM, sigh).
I’d say, no option in the notification bubble. Keep the current automagic behaviour by default.
Add an entry “Manage behaviour” or something like that in the right-click menu for the applet.
NM would then show a dialog with a history of the networks it connected to. And here you’d have options like “never again”.
I like your idea about the wireless options but I don’t think I get why you need the same for wireline. Why not just have a preference called ‘Prefer wireline connections’. If this option is checked auto-connect to a wireline connection, if its not, require manual intervention to switch to wireline. Seems simple enough.
I think the wording on the button could be clearer and less ambiguous. You add an explanation to both the wired bubble with the following:
The wired bubble: “Always Auto-connect”/”Don’t Auto-connect again”. In this case you specifically explain the behaviour to be only applicable to an automatic switch from wireless to wired.
On the wireless bubble, however, you explain the auto-connect option to apply to only the particular network that’s popping up. Without these explanations, however, neither buttons’ right meaning would have been clear.
This difference in behaviour between wired/wireless (auto-connect in wired mode is a general option, in wireless it only pertains to connecting to *one* network) makes the text ambigious when it is the same in both situations, and probably trains the user wrong. On both bubbles, I would read it to mean “(Don’t) autoconnect me to a wired/wireless connection”. I wouldn’t read any of the mentioned meanings int that, and would thus mistake the message.
I like the “Prefer this network” idea. I would also not mind anything like the following, which would cut out the mentioned ambiguities:
“Auto-switched from wired to wireless network”
[Don't prefer wired]
“You are now connected to the wired network”
[Always prefer wired]
I say dump the Network Preferences button entirely, that type of button should not be on a notification dialog at all.
I’m still not sure if anyone need any button/checkbox here, but i’m sure that you don’t need to close it (click teh button) because it is notification, it will be available on the screen just for few seconds.
I understand that there is no other way to make the task (like preferences dialog hidden in right click). If so, IMO small checkbox is better than two buttons.
Zack: I like the prefer this network idea. It does bring the concept of “this” network and is pretty short. For the other button something like just Preferences or Configure is probably fine, looking at it now I’m not sure why I put Network in front of it
onox, Jakub, others: You can’t use a checkbox because of the way the notification system was designed. The protocol doesn’t allow for arbitrary widgets in the bubbles, you can only place buttons. It’s a crappy constraint we have to work with until someone fixes the notification system.
David: the Network Preferences (for wireless) would bring up such a dialog where you could fix and organize how your networks are configured.
Jose: I like the ideas, if only we could use a checkbox…
j: The automatic behavior is going to remain, however only having a right click access to fixing things doesn’t help more people to find and use that dialog. We want it to be upfront, but not in the way.
richard: The wired option seems kind of silly in my mind as well. However a lot of people have expressed the desire to plug in a wired connection, yet not disconnect their wireless until it’s gone. This is mostly application behavior related to network switching, but for some things like IRC you can’t just swap out networks.
Frank: good points, you combined a lot of the good ideas.
Shouldn’t post at night, I start to mix up thing. Correction on previous post:
““Auto-switched from wireless to wired network”
[Don’t prefer wired]“
What I would appreciate is an advanced dialog that lets you specify IP settings for a particular wireless network.
For me DHCP works in most cases but there are a few networks I use occasionally that haven’t been set up. It would be nice to be able to configure settings for these networks that are remembered for them but don’t mess up anything else
David: The preference menu should take you to a dialog that would allow for these kinds of settings. I haven’t worked out a dialog yet, but so far we’re thinking it will have at least 2 sections for wireless and wired settings as well as some kind of static IP config.
Bryan,
One hiccup I see with this is that you have to wait for NM to connect to AP’s before you can manage them.
Jay: Yeah, that’s just the inline way of accessing the preferences dialog. The network preferences dialog should also be accessible from either the System Preferences menu or right clicking on the nm-applet icon.