Ever see that Dynamic system tray flyout in Firefox that comes up when you
finished downloading a bunch of files?



It would be very nice if windows did something similar for files that are in
progress of being copied, deleted, and all sorts of other cancellable system
operations. That way you wouldn't have the following scenario:

Copying a big file between computers, your screen top left is occupied by
the progress window, downloading large files in windows explorer, those files
later get copied to their final destination, resulting in the aforementioned
progress window.
All sorts of long running system operations could use the dynamic system
tray flyout mechanism. That way the user is notified that something is
happening, but does not have to watch the progress bar if he doesnt want to.

i like this idea and thought about something similar too, but i'm not a
microsoft developer :-(

"joseph aberamathea" wrote:

> Ever see that Dynamic system tray flyout in Firefox that comes up when you
> finished downloading a bunch of files?
>
> It would be very nice if windows did something similar for files that are in
> progress of being copied, deleted, and all sorts of other cancellable system
> operations. That way you wouldn't have the following scenario:
>
> Copying a big file between computers, your screen top left is occupied by
> the progress window, downloading large files in windows explorer, those files
> later get copied to their final destination, resulting in the aforementioned
> progress window.
> All sorts of long running system operations could use the dynamic system
> tray flyout mechanism. That way the user is notified that something is
> happening, but does not have to watch the progress bar if he doesnt want to.

Sounds like a nice usage for toast/alerts. I think Windows is getting
overrun by dialogs (both modal and non), and demoting progress dialogs to
alert status would go a good way to reducing the clutter (I cannot count the
# of times I've been clicking dialogs off my screen for one of those
annoying cascade-dialog apps & accidentally cancel some action when its
dialog comes up...call it a bad mix of dialog overusage and Explorer's
perpetually broken focus code). Only thing is, even toast is getting out of
hand (IM fills all of hte vertical space when there's a network hiccup), so
*it's* going to need some clutter management tool. Hmmm, lesse, that would
mean for widget control, we could look forward to a browser tab manager, the
window manager (taskbar), the sidebar, the system tray, AND an alert
manager.