GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 684936
Saved/Recently used timers?
Last modified: 2020-11-24 14:24:21 UTC
Could it make sense to have a way to select timers defined at a previous time? E.g.: Spaghetti: 8 minutes Maccheroni: 13 minutes etc
Yep that would be great ! But we should come with a good ui design for this.
My 2¢ written down, as requested by pbor: Some questions to get out of the way: - do we want to be able to have multiple timers active at once? - do we want to be able to have multiple instances of the same timer at once? I'd say the answers to those questions are "that might be nice" and "probably not". The most trivial design here would be one that essentially presents a series of presets for filling in the numbers in the stopped timer. I click "Spaghetti" and 8:00 fills in, for example. Another possibility is that going to the Timer tab (by default) presents a list of the timers you have. This would be done in a similar way to the other tabs. Clicking on one of them takes you to the view that we have now, with the time prefilled (except in the case that this timer was already active, in which case, you'd see the numbers counting down). This view would grow a back button to go back to the grid. The grid could have some indication of which are running and how much time is left for those, although that starts to sound cluttered... There would probably need to be some good support for a transient timer (ie: the "I just want to set one timer once, and not save it with a name"). I guess this could be an always-present tile in the overview that we always sort to the top-left (except when searching). If the user has no saved timers at all then perhaps we could go directly to the screen that we see now. In this case, probably we'd want to add a "Save this timer" button to that screen. Pressing that would ask you a name and (in order to show you what just happened) transition you to the grid view with the new timer highlighted. There is a pretty good chance that the user will just want to click on this icon again anyway, so we're sort of wasting a click here, but without this transition, the sudden appearance of a "back" button would be very confusing and the user may also be confused next time they click on "Timer" and see something they're not used to.
(In reply to comment #2) > My 2¢ written down, as requested by pbor: > > Some questions to get out of the way: > > - do we want to be able to have multiple timers active at once? > > - do we want to be able to have multiple instances of the same timer at once? > > I'd say the answers to those questions are "that might be nice" and "probably > not". > > The most trivial design here would be one that essentially presents a series of > presets for filling in the numbers in the stopped timer. I click "Spaghetti" > and 8:00 fills in, for example. > > Another possibility is that going to the Timer tab (by default) presents a list > of the timers you have. This would be done in a similar way to the other tabs. > Clicking on one of them takes you to the view that we have now, with the time > prefilled (except in the case that this timer was already active, in which > case, you'd see the numbers counting down). This view would grow a back button > to go back to the grid. > > The grid could have some indication of which are running and how much time is > left for those, although that starts to sound cluttered... > > There would probably need to be some good support for a transient timer (ie: > the "I just want to set one timer once, and not save it with a name"). I guess > this could be an always-present tile in the overview that we always sort to the > top-left (except when searching). > > If the user has no saved timers at all then perhaps we could go directly to the > screen that we see now. In this case, probably we'd want to add a "Save this > timer" button to that screen. Pressing that would ask you a name and (in order > to show you what just happened) transition you to the grid view with the new > timer highlighted. There is a pretty good chance that the user will just want > to click on this icon again anyway, so we're sort of wasting a click here, but > without this transition, the sudden appearance of a "back" button would be very > confusing and the user may also be confused next time they click on "Timer" and > see something they're not used to. Tell me, that you are joking:) You have replied almost in one year:-) I always thought that this timer concerning part of deign and implementation has long been finished:-) Please do not mind:-)
Timers that were added stay in the list unless they are manually removed in the current design (3.38). This looks like a satisfying solution.