Percentage transfer request

[RunyCalmera]

Would be great if you could see a percentage of the transfer. Now you see "Transferring..."
And you don't know the megabytes per second and how much you have to wait.

Transfering 1% completed. 2% etc till 100% would be great.

And showing the current transferring speed 8 mb per second upload/transfer would be awesome.

And 15 minutes remaining completion would be magic.

Giving first time users like me this info will increase the use. As I would know how much time it is going to take.

[jacksongoode]

+1 for seeing a current transfer speed!

[schlagmichdoch]

@RunyCalmera @jacksongoode I'm currently implementing this but I'm unsure about the UI to keep it tidy and simple.

I think a percentage is redundant as the progress circle is quite obvious and looks clean.

I suggest 3 different messages:

• "Sending..."
• "1min 25s"
• "20 Mbps"

I'd switching between these every 3s. Any thoughts?

Also, I'm not sure whether to show the transfer speed in Mbps or MB/s. MB/s might be easier to understand (10 MB file transferred with 10 MB/s takes 1s) while Mbps is commonly used in network and transfer contexts.

If someone uses an internet connection with 100 Mbps and does not know about the difference between Mbps and MB/s it might be confusing when PairDrop shows a smaller number than the speed of the internet connection.

[sbusch]

Just my 2 ct

I also think that progress would be redundant and just mess up the clean UI. That why I also like your idea of switching between those 3 messages, 3s seems fine to me.

You could start switching after a time longer than those 3s, to show the alternating texts only for longer transfers, for example after 5 or 10 seconds. That should also slightly improve accuracy of first shown predictions for ETA and transfer speed.

I'd vote for 10 MB/s (decimal system, not binary "MiB"), and would suggest other units, e.g. 50 kB/s (decimal system ⇾ lowercase k, not "KiB") for transfer speed < 1 MB/s which can easily happen on roaming scenarios. In a future settings menu you could offer options what info to show:

• Speed (MB/s)
• Bandwidth (Mbps)
• ETA

P.S: thanks for this great project :-)

[schlagmichdoch]

Thanks for your input @sbusch!

I'd vote for 10 MB/s (decimal system, not binary "MiB"), and would suggest other units, e.g. 50 kB/s (decimal system ⇾ lowercase k, not "KiB") for transfer speed < 1 MB/s which can easily happen on roaming scenarios.

I'm with you on that one. MiB is used for bandwidth only. This is about transfer speed so MB/s and kB/s it is.

In a future settings menu you could offer options what info to show:

• Speed (MB/s)
• Bandwidth (Mbps)
• ETA

I'm not a fan of options as this adds complexity for the user but feel free to create an issue if you see it is needed in the future.

Finally, this is in a robust state to be tested: https://pairdrop-dev.onrender.com 🎉

I have increased the switching interval to 5s to make it easier to read. I would appreciate it, if you could test whether everything works as expected.

[schlagmichdoch]

As the repository was falsely flagged and hidden for the last month this probably never reached you so this is a friendly bump.

@sbusch I would appreciate it, if you could test this feature on the instance above.

[HeCorr]

I personally dislike the switching between messages, it's not always fast enough and can be annoying if you want to watch just one of the metrics.
I think showing it all at once is better, but since adding Sending... / Receiving... to that would make it too long, you could add up and down arrows instead (but not with emojis 😅):

[schlagmichdoch]

To keep things simple this is only implemented for transfers longer than 10s anyway. The switching was a natural extension of that. I like the current dev implementation but I see your point, that having to wait 6 seconds to see the same metric again is quite long.

Maybe we could reduce the switch to:

• Sending... / Receiving...
• 14.3 MB/s - 1min 25s

I think this would be clearer than having an up / down arrow.

@sbusch What do you think?