Now we’ve got nice graphs for gnome-system-monitor I had to clean things up a bit, people commented on the following issues which have now been resolved one way or another;
- Default colours are now nice
- When a pie shows 0% you can still see what colour it is
- When the mouse hovers over a button it highlights and shows a tooltip (I need this translating) to indicate it activates a colour picker
- The pies are now somewhat sharper but I’ve been tweaking it by .25px to try and get it perfect but its not that easy to get the circles to align nicely, maybe some tweaks to the AA?
- The colour pickers are now indented to the start of the graphs
- The colour pickers are now doubled up horizontally to achieve a better use of space
- a bunch of other niggles
I will be committing this change after I’ve resolved a few minor issues and polished up the patch a little more but this is an actual screen shot of the current system monitor. As you can probably tell from my comments there are still a few things left to do…
Context & Layout issue – Should I space these out to align nicely with the other colour pickers? My initial thought is yes, and that when there are 4 CPUs they simply divide up the space evenly (homogeneous spacing), this requires some tinkering but won’t take too long. Also should I include the CPUx number, and reverse the removal of (imho irrelevant) detail? I could possibly try and break it down into cores but I think this requires some work in libgtop?
Grammar issue #1 – I think this should only be the bold text Memory and Swap instead of including Used and User? which seem to be completely inconsistent and grammatically incorrect. I also think that the : should be dropped but I am unsure how this affects the translation.
Grammar issue #2 – I think this should read Receiving at and Total received and Sending at and Total Sent, dropping the :’s altogether here also,the alignment does a fair enough job of separating them.
FFR #1 – The trick for this is to calculate to the nearest reasonable scale from the users perspective rather than 100% of whatever the last peak was. I’d like to see 120KiB/s here for instance instead of 100%, this will require some further indentation work, but should actually clean up some old code a little too.
FFR #2 – Smooth scrolling graphs, by working with some slight of hand trickery and some clever caching and clipping I should be able to reduce the CPU load and put out about 10 fps for the graph scroll, I might also test it at 20 fps to see what kind of CPU load I get but either way I’m reasonably confident I can reduce the load and improve the scrolling speed.
FFR #3 – I want to add a flashing activity light to the network colour buttons, the highlight stuff is already fairly complete, but I still have to add a get/settter, I’m planning on using a timer inside of the widget, does anyone have any warnings/advice about doing this?
FFR #4 (not on the picture) – I want to suspend all draw/update routines on hidden pages so for instance I’m not updating the writable memory every second when I’m watching graphs and things like that, it’s important that I identify the hogs in gsm and reduce their impact dramatically.
FFR #5 (not on the picture) – I have already taken note of the suggestions to include an “identify the hog and kill it” function, so I will shortly be crafting a bug report which I’ll dutifully assign to myself to include a health page in the system monitor tabs which updates once a minute or so; the health page will include information such as the current cpu hog, the current memory hog, possibly a power hog (powertop?), a list of unresponsive/zombie applications and a total value of wasted resources they’re using, the calculated “health” of the system with a description and icon selection born out of the historical state of the system over the last 15 minutes, and whatever else you’d like to be included in the “health” I’d like to introduce this page as a way of getting a very quick look at broken things and resolve these issues fast, instead of spending a few minutes poking around to do what you need to do.
FFR #5 (not on the picture) – I want to add some extra useful netstat information to gsm in a new page including things like open ports and their attached processes, possibly their current network utilisation? but more of a process orientated network page rather than just more graphs.
What do you want? – I will be sifting through the requests for information and vital statistics that should be added to the graphs page. The question I’d like you to ask yourself is, what do I use the terminal for that should be in the system monitor?
This is great. I guess system-settings will soon be the most polished gnome dialog at all.
For the “what else do you need” question, harddrive load would be great. I have it on some desklet, not sure which command line tool would bring it up.
For the timing function, I use gobject_timeout_add with great pleasure.
Cheers.
C&LI: Er, those appear to be masquerading as a key, which they’re clearly not. I think you should display the current values differently.
GI1: That should be ‘User Memory’ and ‘Swap’ and they should be styled consistently. Don’t remove the colons! I’d also change it to “1.2GiB (61.0%) of 2.0GiB”, I think.
GI2: I think ‘Receiving’ and ‘Received’ and ‘Sending’ and ‘Sent’ would suffice.
This is great, improving things like this, and polishing all areas, make the gnome desktop simply a better overal experience.
A temperature montitor would be good, and harddrive as well. Once it gets to 3+ graphs tho on one dialog then things may get a bit cluttered, perhaps a tabbing system to tab between the different types of sensors? Or maybe a drop down list? Only trouble them is it is impossible to look at 2 graphs at the same time… just some food for thought.
Great work
sweet! if this gets in before UI freeze (please note that we’re in UI and string change announcement period), it could be worth to add this to
http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap
Wow, very good work, can’t wait to try it!
Very nice looking. One thought. The memory used Pie Chart Icon. It would make more sense to me if it were a circle that got bigger or smaller depending on usage. You have the outline of it. At 0% it is just a dot, and then as the usage increases the circle gets bigger and bigger (or if it is amount free gets smaller and smaller). Might be easier to code than the pie chart you currently have.
A huge feature to have would be the ability to minimize the charts into sparklines.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR&topic_id=1
You could display lots of stats with history, but without using up the entire screen.
I think the word swap is a technical term and shouldn’t be used in end-user facing programs. Although I’m pretty sure that a large percentage of the users of g-s-m are programmers, I still think a more translatable string would be better. I think they should be just “Memory” and “Virtual Memory”. I think the term Virtual Memory is better than “Page file” because 1) users didn’t take Computer Architecture 101 so they don’t know what pages are, and 2) we don’t use a file like OS X or Windows.
I think just Memory is also better than “Physical Memory” because to users, a computer is a black and mystical box, they have no idea what is physical and what isn’t.
I think your idea for Grammar issue 2 is great. Programmers over-use colons, and they don’t realize that in some languages the colon has different meanings (See wikipedia) or no real meaning (like in non-roman based script). However the SVO order in “Receiving at” might be difficult to translate correctly in a SOV language like Japanese where the sentence “Receiving at 10kb/s” would be reversed so that 10KB/s is first. I think Matthew W. S. Bell had the right idea, except perhaps “Total received” is better than just “Received”.
I think all the FFRs are awesome. Especially the Netstat one. I can’t wait for you to check this in so we can all join in the fun.
I really like this very much and am looking forward to using it, but ther is one thing I do not like in this new version:
I think the pie charts with the dot in the middle are really ugly,
and they are distorting perception (normally in a pie chart, the
area is proportional to the values). Wouldn’t it be a possibility
to show the center dot only for “zero”, and not for other values?
This pie chart is so strange IMHO that some people might even not get it is one (I certainly have never seen one like this before). I don’t think “innovation” is a good thing in this field.
/ralph
Ah, forgot something: I personally would indeed prefer the CPU numbers to be kept, I had to think a bit until I realized what the items
marked 28% and 1% were (but then I normally don’t use a dual-core CPU).
@Thomas: Email me with the desktlet URI or something!
@Matthew W. S. Bell: The colour buttons are a legend, as is normal to have on a graph. I agree with you on your remarks about using brackets, I considered this for a moment… I probably should have just done it there and then.
@Jon: I have to figure out how to create a decent library to deal with cross platform temperature monitoring, I’d have to make it work in other unix’s too, or at least support a common subset of methods of obtaining info.
I already have an open bug for this
and a cool idea for temp graphs.
@David: we already have plans to add sparklines to the process list, I don’t think expanding and shrinking the pie is a good idea.
@Eduardo Gonzalez: AHA! yes, thank you, I’ve been wondering what was wrong with swap, it just stopped sitting well with me all of a sudden!
Agreed on all other points, I will have to make a note of everything I’m changing for translators to keep track of it all!
@Ralph Aichinger: If enough people complain I’ll revert the change, however I don’t see much point right now, I think its perfectly OK to do this especially with all of the surrounding text labels.
@Ralph: Did the bold text above the graph not give it away?
- Sparklines (though I know you’ve seen the bug about that)
- Graphs axes should be labelled: perhaps the vertical axes should be labelled in terms of what they’re measuring i.e. actual memory counts, counts of bytes sent/received etc rather than percentages. Debatable. The horizontal axes should be labelled as well: no easy way to see how long ago that spike occurred (3 notches, whatever that is, versus 15 seconds?)
Very nice !
However, I’d really like the cpu/mem hogs to be identified just by a tooltip when hovering over the applet. (only when there’s a hog, of course).
I’d have to agree with Ralph. The pie charts are weird, especially with the dot. I think it’s best not to let the icons actually show the memory usage. For one thing, it duplicates the information given in the graph, and breaks overall consistency (i.e. shouldn’t the other resource icons also represent charts?).
Visually, the pie-charts (with or without the dots) don’t agree with me. They are just too complex, and don’t actually convey the right metaphor (color-picker-thingy). If they don’t convey the right metaphor, then they can only confuse the user, and break the visual appeal of the dialog. I think we need something a bit simpler here, maybe just a simple colour-filled rectangle. Simple is good
There’s also an issue of themes. The widget colour can approximate the grey outline of the pie-charts, which will can make the outline invisible or hard to see.
I haven’t installed the new gsm and tried it out first-hand, so please bear in mind if I miss something.
Looks great! But I thing the square color pickers should be bigger. They look so small and out of place compared to the other color pickers.
What about something like iotop?
http://guichaz.free.fr/misc/#iotop
Its any easy way to find out why the HD is working and which process is causing this (ie. updatedb, beagle etc)
My favourite of the FFRs is FFR5. There seems to be no easy way to get the system to tell you which process is hogging the network at the moment.
hi, can you add the hdd temperature (i.e. hddtemp) and the gpu temperature (i.e. nvclock) to the system monitor?
I hope KiB and GiB are disabled by default.
For better or worse Gnome uses KB and GB as the default (long ago specified in the documentation style guide) and it is great that some developers are making it possible for users to use the other notation but it must be cleanly abstracted if Gnome is maintain a high level of internal consistency.
It would be fine if there was a policy or Gnome Goal to have all of Gnome able to use KiB and GiB and perhaps enable it everywhere when a major release occurs and it can be done in a consistent manner.
–
Alan Horkan
Great work! Please don’t stop rocking
Looks sweet (and clean!), thanks for working on this!
Great job!
Please add time information in the graphics.
I”d love to see a more usable Network systray monitor, that shows graphs both incoming and outgoing bps with configurable scales, “a la” knetload. I don’t think the current systray network monitor graph serves a practical purpose…
there is a feature request for this in gnome bugzilla
For a long time I’ve been using Knetload instead of g-s-m for a system-tray network graph; and g-s-m for processor load; i’d like to use g-s-m for both…
Looks very smooth! Great work