Matthew Tylee Atkinson, 17th September 2007
Launchpad blueprint short name: reduce-popups
update-manager does a great job at bringing package upgrades to the novice (GUI) computer user. However, it does have a tendency to produce rather a lot of potentially both irritating and alarming popups during the (relatively simple) update process. This is a justification of why there is a problem and a suggestion on how it can be simply and effectively solved.
Though this is a GUI tool designed to make updating easy, I think it can actually be more complex to use than the command-line approach. The current version represents a very good start on the usability front, but I feel that there are some big (and fairly simple) improvements that could be made.
The main problem IMHO is that such a lot of popups are spawned and changes made to the main window during one update routine. Though most of these windows exist only to impart the progress of one stage of the update to the user, they make the process seem overly complex to them. In a typical install process, the following window spawns/changes occur.
Please bear in mind that most of these popups are not actually the type of window that the user would need to interact with; they're essentially just progress meters.
This causes problems in the following situations.
My proposed solution is to collapse most of these external windows into the main one. By this, I mean that a status/progress bar should be embedded into the main window at the bottom that shows the progress of actions when the the controls in the main window are disabled.
This way, no annoying popups occur during normal usage (of course they'd be needed in the event of an error, or when input from the user is required) and the update can be left to run without bothering—even alarming—the user with popup messages (which most users tend to associate with the feeling that "oh dear; there has been a problem" until they've read what the message is about).
I hope that this has clearly explained the motives for and proposal of this blueprint. Please contact me if you feel this is a good idea and I will happily provide more information as needed.