Show archive mounting progress indication spinner close to the location where the click happened?
Problem statement
Testing Pika 0.6.2, with an ext4 USB2 HDD as the backup storage medium, whenever you click one of the archives snapshots row actions to "Browse saved files", it takes a solid 30 seconds (according to my stopwatch) to do the mounting (until Nautilus opens with that snapshot) the first time.
During that time, Pika only shows a spinner in the headerbar. There are two problems with this:
- Its location is visually far from where the mouse cursor/click occurred, and thus from where the eye's gaze is. While geeks / computer-savvy folks will probably notice the spinner (except in the 2nd point below), the usability problem for a particular demographic of users is that I know some non-technical folks will not notice the spinner because it is too far away. I wish I was exaggerating/joking. My parents/aunts/uncles don't notice anything going on on the screen unless it's right in front of where their eyes were looking!
- If the user has GNOME's "Reduce Animations" accessibility setting turned on, the spinner will not spin, so it is even less noticeable.
I know that my family members, confronted with a non-instantaneous archive open process, will think they mis-clicked or that the software "did not register the command" and will click again repeatedly.
Potential ideas
Presuming there is no way to estimate linearly how long it would take to mount and open an archive (otherwise you could show a progress percentage label in that action row...), could the spinner be shown directly on (or next to) the row where the click occurred, maybe? And/or could an extra label be added to that row to say something like "Opening archive, please wait…"? I'm not sure how else to make it really obvious for the non-technical users I support in my family.