HIG 3.0 Proposal for displaying long running tasks

• Existing art: nautilus-3.0
• Place a resident notification in the message tray

  • Diagram: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3231274/hig3.0_message_tray.png

• "Show Details" action or something similar to provide a link to the application
• Displayed information:
  • Type of task
    • Download, File operation, Print job
  • Icon of the performing application
  • Estimate remaining time
    • Use clever rounding
      • "1h, 13min and 23 sec" is a completely misleading and bogus information (e.g. it is very, very unlikely that the download will exactly finish after this time period)
      • for instead you can use "around 1h and 15 minutes remaining"

      • see Nautilus/ProgressWindow#Time_remaining

    • If ETA is not available or reliable then don't show it!
  • As an alternative you can display another information, which makes sense in the context (e.g "printed 5 of 12 pages")