maemo.org Bugzilla – Bug 5516
Image Viewer: Dealing with "occupied" images is confusing
Last modified: 2010-03-15 20:56:48 UTC
You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.
SOFTWARE VERSION: 41-10 STEPS TO REPRODUCE THE PROBLEM: 1. Make sure you have some photos on Internal Storage 2. Plug N900 into computer via USB and choose Mass Storage mode 3. Open Photo app 4. Click on one of the photos that is on Internal Storage EXPECTED OUTCOME: Remain in thumbnail view with yellow banner saying, "Image is currently unavailable." ACTUAL OUTCOME: Image "opens" as a black screen with yellow banner saying, "Image is no longer available." REPRODUCIBILITY: Always OTHER COMMENTS: Clicking on the opened black screen takes it out of full-screen mode, but it's still a black screen that must be exited in order to return to thumbnails. Not only is the black screen confusing, but the text in the banner makes it sound like the image is gone or has been deleted (not just "in use"). An additional step might be to alert the user to the fact that the image isn't available due to the device being connected, etc.
What happens is following: 1. Tracker receives pre-unmount signal for /home/user/MyDocs 2. It removes all affected images (and other documents) from the list of available resources, does not, of course, remove images themselves. 3. Image Viewer gets this notification and displays it. We can probably separate meaning of "unmounted" and "deleted" within Image Viewer so that when pre-unmount signal is sent, we note for URIs representing resources "being unmounted" to change the notification text. Would this help?
That solution would help for clarification, but might not completely solve the "problem." After thinking about this for a while, I thought: Why not allow mounted images/docs to be viewed, but only in read-only mode? That way, the UX wouldn't be interrupted at all. At the point that someone tried to alter the file, the message would be: Your file system is currently mounted and this file cannot be changed. Would you like to save it as a new file? (Or, something like that.) Or, maybe I don't completely understand the technicalities.
(In reply to comment #2) > That solution would help for clarification, but might not completely solve the > "problem." > > After thinking about this for a while, I thought: Why not allow mounted > images/docs to be viewed, but only in read-only mode? That way, the UX wouldn't > be interrupted at all. At the point that someone tried to alter the file, the > message would be: > > Your file system is currently mounted and this file cannot be changed. Would > you like to save it as a new file? The problem with this approach is that we unmount VFAT partition before exporting it as block device via USB (or user removes additional MicroSD card, this does not matter as end result is the same). This effectively means Maemo system has no file-system level access to the referred data. Thus, we cannot show anything but "This file is currently cannot be accessed from within the device".
Ah, ok. That makes more sense to me then. Honestly, I don't really care how the user is notified about this occurring. What I do care about is the fact that users shouldn't: 1. ...be taken to a black screen that has no pertinent info 2. ...be taken to a black screen that needs interaction in order to return to windowed view 3. ...think that their photos/file have been deleted Triggering a yellow info banner upon clicking on a thumbnail (or file), without navigating away from the current view seems optimal.
Good points. A similar "everything disappeared" issue is also in MediaPlayer when metadata is in transitioned state. The changes you are proposing are more of UI behavior. We need to clone this bug to internal bugzilla and propose these changes to UI designers first.
Internal proposal is to use the string “Memory not available\nUSB cable connected” instead.
Ok. It's a start, but there's still an expectation that users will know exactly what that means. We'll see when tech support calls start drizzling in. ;) After thinking about this further, I was wondering if this might be a better scenario (for images): When memory is unavailable, the image thumbnail is still in the device cache (I'm assuming, since you can still see it in the thumbnail view of the Image Viewer). Why not blow that up to full-screen when it's tapped (yes, it's very low-res). The message could be the same as suggested. This would be better than a black screen imo. But, even better would be to have that message appear in a yellow banner when the thumbnail was clicked and not navigate the user to another screen (i.e., leave them at the thumbnail view).
So yeah, “Memory not available\nUSB cable connected” will be displayed in the next public update (PR1.2) when in Image Viewer and mass storage mode is activated. Closing as FIXED.
Setting explicit PR1.2 milestone (so it's clearer in which public release the fix will be available to users). Sorry for the bugmail noise (you can filter on this message).