On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 20:54 -0400, Steven Garrity wrote: > Taking a quick look at the Gnome System Monitor today, it occurred to me > that the graphs have a distinct EGA-graphics-circa-1986 visual feel to > them. These graphs are ripe for some Tufte-fication [1]. >
On the subject of Tufte and gnome-system-monitor, I've implemented a GtkCellRenderer subclass for sparklines and implemented it for the per-process CPU usage: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=319682 > Here's a quick mockup of the dialog with some suggested color (and only > color) changes: > > http://actsofvolition.com/images/screenshots/gnome/system-monitor-mockup.png > > In the hopes of keeping potential implementation simple, I have only > changed is the background color, grid color, and changed the default > user-configurable colors to some I picked quickly from the HIG [2]. Of > course, smoother lines would be nice too... Going slightly beyond the above, both X and Y axis ought to be labelled, probably with a simple 100% at the top of the Y axis, and perhaps minutes on the axis axis. (an unlabelled axis is one of Tufte's peeves) Going much beyond, who is the intended user of gnome-system-monitor, and what is its purpose? Is it simply a GTK replacement for "top", or is it intended to show something that's meaningful to: - end-users? - sysadmins? - software developers? (I don't think that "top" is particularly good for any of the above) My primary use of sparklines is when I'm wondering why my CPU spiked 10 seconds ago and I only just got control back over the UI (by which time the constantly shifting CPU stats aren't helpful - what if the process isn't around anymore?) [snip] Hope this helps Dave _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
