Show pod status in IDE

[NormalGaussian]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

I often work with many pods open, my interactions with them have unnecessary breaking context changes (lose train of thought / efficiency) and time wastes.

• Checking to see if a pod is open yet is a breaking context change, and I lose time if I haven't noticed it is open yet (or has errored)
• Jumping into a tab and scrolling to stop them timing out is a breaking context change (as I have no good warning that it is going to time out)
• Waiting for a pod that timed out to restart is a breaking context change

Describe the behaviour you'd like

GitPods could use the titlebar, in particular the favicon to indicate gitpod status:

Lifecycle:

• Pod starting
• Building image
• Start / Image build failed (error icon)
• Pod active (normal gitpod icon)
• Pod will timeout in 10 minutes (configurable)
• Pod has timed out

This means when working in the browser I have an at a glance way to see the top level status of all my workspaces (in that browser).

Good favicons for each of these are hard to do. They need to indicate the status as well as the fact it is a gitpod (so as not to be confused with other tabs).

Describe alternatives you've considered

• Using titlebar text

  • I'm unlikely to notice this, particularly if lots of tabs are open

• Browser Notifications

  • I generally find these annoying, but they could be helpful in addition to the titlebar

• Building my own alert system

  • Very involved
  • Requires adding things to image & gitpod.yaml & an external database/system

Additional context

None

Thanks guys

[sagor999]

hey @gitpod-io/engineering-ide
I believe we have heartbeat for this now, is that correct?

[akosyakov]

Control of the title bar yes, but i don't really think that it is only solution. We leave the control of title bar to IDE itself and don't interfere with it.

[gtsiolis]

A boring (simple) solution as a good MVC (minimum viable change) for resolving this could be updating the favicon based on the workspace status or start phase. Title is used to indicate the status, not intended for implementation.

Running	Starting, Stopping, Timing out	Error	Stopped & Timed out

Alternatively, we could introduce toned down favicon icon form the error and stopped phases.

Error	Stopped & Timed out

Cc @akosyakov @loujaybee

Cc @jldec In case this is something that could be interesting for the @gitpod-io/engineering-webapp to pick up.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.