Startup Actions
Status: draft | unimplemented
We have a number of actions we want to do every time we start the game:
Auto download puzzles
Auto-clean old puzzles
This doc will list requirements and details for implementing this.
Auto Download
The idea behind this feature is to download puzzles to play when
starting the song. This is triggered by the
auto-download-puzzle-sets gsettings key, and can be selected in the
preferences dialog.
Implementation details
On startup, we should determine the list of puzzle sets the user has subscribed to and see if they have auto downloaders. We would then run through them serially and download each one.
Some considerations:
If there’s no network on startup, we shouldn’t run the downloaders. If network becomes available, we could then trigger the download stage.
The Downloader currently has a cancel dialog that pops up after a certain time. We will need to suppress that dialog, but probably cancel the operation if it takes too long. Maybe a 10-second timeout is sufficient to give the downloader a chance to finish but not wait indefinitely.
We need to figure out how best to notify the user about progress. We can use the global AdwToast to do this notification, but will have to be careful with the priority to make sure it doesn’t overlap with other toasts. Maybe a toast like:
Downloading puzzles (x/n) [Cancel]Would be sufficient. We expect this to be a relatively quick operation.Alternatively, just doing it silently could be sufficient. The user may not need to know.
Variants
We should keep track of the last time we went into a puzzle set and determine if there are new puzzles available. These puzzles could be added either by the auto downloader or updating the puzzle set (eg, maya’s puzzles). We could add a label saying “New puzzles available” in this instance in the main page.
GNOME 44 has support for background apps. We can consider an option where we keep the app running and have it download crosswords daily regardless of whether you start it.
Along the same lines, if we keep the app open for more than 24 hours, do we want to trigger this again? It’s pretty straightforward to add that timer, but is it something the user would expect?