UI suggestion: alternative compression ratio format

[Rick van der Zwet]

Compression ratio is currently shown in the compressing dialog as percentage round((Processed/Compressed Size) *100), for example 20%, where-as in the general (data) compression ratio is shown of the form of 5:1.

The percentage notation requires some thinking, since one would think a highter percentage actually means a better compression. Instead of only displaying precentages could we also include the 'ratio notation' to make it more clear at first clance what is meant by compression ratio?

Attached a mockup of the 'precentage' and 'ratio notation' combined.

[Shell]

I would like to suggest one more thing to the UI: display compression speed based on several most recent MBs of data (maybe in addition to the overall speed). That is, if I have disk error, the speed drops to 0, and if I am compressing a sparse region, it raises to hundreds MB/s.

As for the compression ratio, it may be useful to display a second progress bar indicating the compressed size. Visualization of compression ratio is often convenient. Some archivers offer a composite bar with both processed and compressed size.

[Stuart]

Yes, totally agree with the OP. It's always irritated me how it says "Compress ratio" when it's a percentage.

What the field currently tells you is "Percent of original size", so the field should be labelled that.

[Stuart]

As a mock-up, this is how I would have it: let people choose between "ratio", "reduction" (percentage the data processed so-far has been reduced by) and "percent of original size" (how big the processed data is compared to the amount processed so far). The middle one is my preference: I prefer to know how much I've saved, not what % the archive size is of the data processed.

I'd also prefer as Shell suggests to be able to choose a fixed value for how file-sizes are displayed, both in the compress/extract dialog, and the internal file-browser, with MB (base 1024) being my preference. Should be able to choose between KB, MB and GB, with "Auto" switching between them based on what is most-appropriate for the field (e.g. 997KB, 703MB or 1.2GB).

[Stuart]

Also, as we can but dream, it would also be awesome if there were two progress bars -- the top one showing the operation total (every file in the set) and a second bar below to show progress on the current file being operated on, similar to how WinRAR displays.

The second bar should only be used when appropriate: I would suggest when it will take more-than 3 seconds to process a file (so only if "CurrentFileSize" dividedby "CurrentCompressionSpeed" would be larger than 3, to avoid flickering). So if your compression speed was say 3MB/sec, a 9MB file or-less would not display and the bar would remain grey with no filename shown.