Mathias,
Quickstart is very useful, of course, but there is no need to display an
icon just to remind the user of the existence of the Quickstart feature.
Both Mozilla and MS Office have quicklaunch features - they never show
up as tray icons, though. What would happen if every service that is
running in the background added a tray icon?
Furthermore, I suggest checking the tray icons on a typical Windows
system to see what functionality they provide. Almost all tray icons
offer some explicit functionality (except for hardware-related icons).
A tray icon that does nothing will disappoint many users (and will be
easily noticed by reviewers). It is not appropriate from a UI
perspective. Why not just eliminate it? (To emphasize this again:I am
not advocating to eliminate the quickstart feature, only the visual
icon).
The better option, of course, would be to add the launch menu back to
the tray icon. I was not able to find the discussion you mentioned, but
you say the decision to eliminate them was now recognized as a mistake.
Why not put the launch menu back in? A developer should not need more
than ten minutes to do that - it's just a menu!
I especially liked the menu because it so clearly differentiates OOo
from MSOffice. It shows that the applications in OOo are much more
tightly integrated than in MS Office. Previously, I thought of OOo as
one application: only when clicking on the quickstart icon, did I have
to decide what kind of a document I wanted to open (often it was a
template and I did not even care about the application type). Abolishing
the launch icon changes the way that the user perceives OOo and takes
away that advantage over MS Office.
Cheers
-Alexander
Mathias Bauer wrote:
> What do you think does the name "quickstarter" express? Yes, exactly,
> it's a trick to speed up the startup of OOo. So it isn't useless at
all.
>
> I know that many people (including me) liked the now missing menu, but
> why it was removed and why this eventually was a mistake was discussed
> often and widely enough so that I will not do it again.
