Please comment what is definitely needed in the GUI and if possible submit your ideas in form of images.
I want to start this project the right way. The best solution to that is to involve as many people as possible to create a template/scheme for the GUI.
may I suggest laying out a design in terms of features and interaction model first. We should have a clear vision and set goals. Maybe start out small and level up from there.
The main goal off the GUI would be to make rclone a available to a broader audience. Right now only tech savvy people will start using rclone.
Rclone should be easily understandable by everyone.
Even the creation process of the cache, crypt etc could be guided via an guy many people are any more comfortable using GUI. (We could offer the terminal based setup and an guided GUI setup. You can choose which one you want)
Also I was thinking of including templates of configs which work the best for specific usecases (users could submit their config and vote for their favorite one)
In that way people would have a good config right from the start which was tested by a lot of other people already.
I will try to find a list of all features rclone has and then I will post in a few hours which features I think should definitely be included.
Please let me also know your point of view/your approach for a GUI.
thank you for your elaborate answer. I’m totally in line with your plans for an RClone GUI.
Make it approachable and empower anyone to easily backup their data.
And with this, in the first steps we should focus on the simplicity of the process for novice users.
Something along the lines of:
• storage config
• backup
• restore
Review and iterate on workflows, iron out the kinks and advance from there.
We should discuss the approach of being data centric vs. being storage centric.
I think novice users would focus more on their data, while advanced users may be more centric about storage space. By data centric I think of users that don’t want to manage their data. They just want to have it back when they need it. While from personal experience, people who tend to manage their data manually they often are more storage centric.
We need not choose one approach, we could implement multiple.
Please let me know how you think about it. This is in direct reply to Gelsas, but please, everybody feel free to comment.
I completely agree with everything you said. I think we should implement multiple approaches.
Do we have some kind of cloud based sheet where we can write down/darw everything? If yes that would make it easier to collaborate.
Or should we do it in this thread ?
I think the most needed feature would be the possibility to select multiple items and a nice and clean queue/transfers status info panel with maybe current up/down speeds/connections visible at all times either in the icon and/or in one of the app corners/status bars.
Ah and multiplatform is a must! (don’t forget Linux and MacOSX! he he)
Again thanks for thinking about the community around RCLONE!
My thinking was if the GUI is implemented as Javascript and served from rclone then it will work with any browser…
However I’m really bad at GUI design, and have no practical experience with React (though I have read a book on it now) so very much at the stage of - “Oooh there is an idea!”.
So, this is a cool idea, but also tricky. (I have some experience with web UIs for Go programs, if you have any questions.)
My primary concern is binary bloat: a GUI will add considerable MB to the file size, but I ship rclone around a lot in headless environments, where I don’t use the GUI anyway. Would there remain a non-GUI version?
Using internet technologies means that the bulk of the content could be served over the internet so not supplied in the binary was what I was thinking. At very least the images could be served over the internet which would leave the relatively quite small html/css/js in the binary. That would mean the GUI would work without internet too, just without the images.
Alternatively an rclonegui binary might be a better idea - not sure.
I don’t know if I understand correctly, but hearing React and internet technologies I get the sense that we’re not talking about native to the platform GUI paradigms. Instead it sounds alot along the lines of an Electron GUI.
Call me old fashioned, but I do prefer a UI native to the platform the app is running on, especially within file management. I’m curious how you all feel.
An in browser UI is certainly interesting. But how would access priviledges of files be handled, without giving the browser full access to everything. Also, how would automation, e.g. running as a service, or daemon work?
