menu bar improvements

[jbenet]

the menu bar should give some info on the node, like:

• say what ports it's on (swarm, gateway, api)
• stats (maybe under a sub-menu):
  • uptime

  • of peers connected

  • bandwidth numbers

and maybe it should have some more options:

• "Open" should be "Open Web Console" or "Open Web UI" or "Open Admin Console" or something...
• "Open Web Console in Browser" (opens in a normal browser, just in case)
• "Configuration" (opens config in an editor)
• "Restart" (kills the node and reboots it)
• "Check for Update" (checks for update-- we need to figure this out)

[bcomnes]

I couldn't find a way to dynamically update the tray menu contents last I checked but I'm totally 👍 on these stats. https://github.com/maxogden/menubar Fakes a menu using html/css and is dynamically updatable if we can't dynamically update the native menu system.

[jbenet]

html menu means we can draw whatever we want, which is nice

otoh, native menus are more ok with people. im down for whatever, if we do html, we should use it creatively.

[krl]

You can update the context menu, but that also closes the menu for the user, for now i'm doing something like this:

@jbenet

[jbenet]

@krl good stuff!

• "run daemon" is not very intuitive for end users. This is a tricky UI, because we want to give people the idea of "turning something On and Off". maybe "connect to swarm" could be grayed out when daemon is offline.

Maybe something like:

IPFS local node running ...
Stop IPFS node
[ ] Online (connected to swarm)
---
Open Console Window
Open Console in Browser
---
Exit

Hmm not sure. Maybe:

(Experimenting. probably want a real designer to figure this out, not me)

[jbenet]

btw, we can use arbitrary web page as a menu. see https://github.com/maxogden/ScreenCat

[krl]

jbenet: in osx that is, it seems like linux/windows support for this is not in. i could look at enabling that, but do we want to go that path?

[krl]

i'm really into your designs though.

[krl]

An alternative in the meantime i just thought of colud be using radio buttons.

( ) idle, off, eh? whatever to call it
( ) run local node
( ) run connected node

---

[ ] check for updates

[jbenet]

@krl i think we'll get a lot more mileage out of an HTML window.

[krl]

from: https://github.com/atom/electron/blob/master/docs/api/tray.md

Platform limitations:

On OS X clicked event will be ignored if the tray icon has context menu.
On Linux app indicator will be used if it is supported, otherwise GtkStatusIcon will be used instead.
App indicator will only be showed when it has context menu.
When app indicator is used on Linux, clicked event is ignored.

So if you want to keep exact same behaviors on all platforms, you should not rely on clicked event and always attach a context menu to the tray icon.

It seems to be the case that you cannot even get the 'clicked' event in gnome for example.

[krl]

hmm actually: electron/electron#1741

I'll investigate this.

[bcomnes]

Those mockups look amazing! I don't know how to do the cool dropbox style window arrow, but everything else looks totally doable and nice.

[jbenet]

@bcomnes on the transparency, we could actually have a nice space background instead of making it transparent, which gets us 50% of the way there.

@krl do you need frontend help to make all this look super nice? If it's not your thing we can find someone who is good at it. (we should allocate resources optimally)

[krl]

Yeah, i'm not spending a lot of time on the design now, just getting something that looks decent and that works. I think having a designer go over it would be ideal.

[whyrusleeping]

how would the drop 'down' thing work for people (like me) who have their tray at the bottom of the screen?

[jbenet]

drop up! /o\

On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 12:55 PM, Jeromy Johnson notifications@github.com
wrote:

how would the drop 'down' thing work for people (like me) who have their
tray at the bottom of the screen?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#3 (comment).

[krl]

@jbenet Ok, the stats shown in your example, is there a way to actually get them from the api, or from the client without daemon running?

[jbenet]

@krl maybe we should add an ipfs repo stat command

[krl]

+1 repo stat command

[jbenet]

@krl let's try getting it in this next sprint for you.

[daviddias]

@jbenet what are your thoughts on a settings/preferences page, UI'wise?

[jbenet]

@diasdavid yeah we can do settings. what are the things we would have there?

[daviddias]

Some that I have in my mind

• repo/folder
• ports
• reset Node (updating key pair)
• start on boot
• bandwith used
• language
• link to help
• user

[dignifiedquire]

@diasdavid @jbenet let's extract individual items from here into separate issues.

[daviddias]

The only item missing after #516 is merged is #523