On Sun, May 21, 2006 at 07:19:33PM +0200, Denis Grelich wrote: > On Sun, 21 May 2006 18:05:56 +0200 > "Anselm R. Garbe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I doubt the usefulness of those tiny tray icons in KDE. > > They are hard to click, because they are too small. They don't > > tell me much, because an icon has different meanings in > > different cultures, and to render them, KDE has several 100kSLOC > > dependencies. Even assumed one would only support xpm's, they > > don't add much benefit. > > I don't want to protect tray icons in KDE, because about every > little piece of code claims the need for a tray icon ;) But it > is not true that icons can't tell you much. I only had a basic > course of biology in school, but about everyone who is > interested in that area will tell you, that icons, symbols and > images are something that the human brain is great in working > with. About every language I suppose has the saying »Ein Bild > sagt mehr, als tausend Worte.«, an image tells more that one > thousand words. Yes, one can abuse images, to create > bon-bon-coloured LSD worlds on your desktop, but used with > thought they can provide a great means of displaying various > information very quickly. That there are culturally different > meanings for symbols is true. Though there are notions that > every human brain shares, everyone using wmii or at least a > computer would understand a well designed symbol ;) (even > easier than the English language I want to claim.)
I agree that an image _can_ tell more than 1000 words. But this must not be the case for each icon. Especially if the icon is small. > Text may be exact, but there are more often situations where > you don't want to care about details, and as I already stated, > an image can have more meaning than a whole sentence. Given > that screen real estate is scarce and expensive (there were > discussions about cycling bar labels! WTF oO), this turns out > to be quite a big benefit. Also, it can give you needed > information much more quickly than any text ever can. Two > simple examples that directly come to my mind for when images > excel text: > See your inbox. You pretty much don't care if there are 10 > mails in your inbox, or just one. If there is at all, you are > going to read it no matter how much they are, don't you ;) So, > displaying a small »letter« symbol in the bar draws your > attention quicker to itself than »You got mail«, »inbox: xx« > or whatever, which also disturbs your worklflow more! (of > course, if there is /always/ a letter icon in your bar that > gets lit or altered, the effect is smaller, but this would be > not very thought-out to do something like that!) A green label with 'M' could transport the same information. One only has to learn the cognition a green label with M means you got mail. See such a label as image. With proper UTF8 there might be glyphs which look like a letter icon, dunno. > Or, see a traffic graph. You can display the current network > load as a absolute number. Or you could display a small graph. > A graph is much easier on brain cycles! In addition, it > displays the network load's course. You /immediately/ see if > there's a peak, a change, or a DDOS/Windows box connected to > the LAN ;) Of course you can have several cycling labels or > some other ugly insanity. But I don't have to explain how that > would be. That is a bad example in my eyes, especially if such a graph is small. First, the network traffic information is quite useless, if such a graph only displays the current load -, second it would need much space to be properly usable, 20px of a network graph don't tells much. You need at least 40px that such info really gains benefits from textual representations like network load (e.g. cur: 10kb/s avg5m: 77.8kb/s avg1d: 45kb/s). But then you can go and use gkrellm or a dockapp instead. > So, there is room for images in a usable window manager. Not > in a minimalistic, but in a usable. And wmii surely > concentrates on usability (which most of the time /is/ > minimalism, but not here!), at least so I hope. I think this icon stuff should not be implemented. It has too less benefit. Supporting instead withdrawn apps in some dockbar seems the better solution. Regards, -- Anselm R. Garbe ><>< www.ebrag.de ><>< GPG key: 0D73F361 _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://wmii.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wmii
