Re: [Tails-dev] How to replace the green onion [was: What do…

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Autore: intrigeri
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To: The Tails public development discussion list
Oggetto: Re: [Tails-dev] How to replace the green onion [was: What do we miss to replace Vidalia]
Hi,

sajolida wrote (10 Mar 2015 14:40:44 GMT) :
> intrigeri:
>> Alan wrote (06 Mar 2015 21:12:43 GMT) :
>>> sajolida <sajolida@???> wrote:
>>>> I hereby propose to have the list of circuits accessible directly from
>>>> the green onion as it is the case now in Vidalia. But I'm not sure how
>>>> this fits with your architectural plans and related security implications.
>>
>> I'm not sure I understand what sajolida meant with "directly" in this
>> sentence. If that's "clicking the onion icon directly starts Tor
>> Monitor", or "clicking the onion icon opens a menu that proposes to
>> start Tor Monitor", then I agree.


> By "directly" I mostly wanted to express a general idea, not a precise
> implementation. I want the list of circuits to be available by clicking
> (somehow) on the green onion and not having to go through menus. That
> could be, from quickest to manipulate to the longest:


Thanks!

> 1. Clicking on the green onion opens a popup (like for Florence) with
> the list of circuits. That would be the most integrated solution but
> depends on the information in that popup to be dense enough. On your
> current screenshot for example, I'm not sure we should keep built but
> unused circuits. We might only list currently used circuits. I'm not
> sure either whether the detail of the relay need to be that complete.


IMO this one requires too much initial time investment, for something
that a) exceeds what's needed to replace Vidalia without losing
important features; and b) might not be what we want on the long
run -- I mean, the UI may be what we want in the end, but to implement
it, we need to first make technical decisions about the separation of
concerns between the underlying programs, and it seems clear to me
that any choice we could make right now has great chances to be wrong
once #7438 is resolved, and then quite some work will have to be
re-done.

> 2. Clicking on the green onion opens Tor Monitor is a window.


Seems trivial to implement.

> 3. Clicking on the green onion opens a menu, and clicking on an item
> from that menu open Tor Monitor in a window.


Seems trivial to implement as well.

> That's your solution if I understand correctly.


I said I would be fine with it. I also said I agreed with "clicking
the onion icon directly starts Tor Monitor", aka. the solution you
call #2, so that's not "my" solution :)

> But I'm not sure to understand what the menu brings, as "Tor is
> ready" is already the message provide by the onion being green.


I see two potential reasons why #3 might be better than #2:

  * a menu leaves us room to add stuff there later if we need to,
    without changing behaviour users have previously been trained to


  * interface consistency => behaviour that's more expected by users:
    all icons in GNOME Shell's top bar open a menu, and don't directly
    trigger any action... except some we've hackishly added there
    ourselves with the topIcons extension (Florence, Pidgin)


Now, indeed #2 is faster to interact with. I'm personally
undecided wrt. which one of these two is the best.

Cheers,
--
intrigeri