Re: [dev] [wmii] widgets with graphics?

From: dtk <dtk_AT_gmx.de>
Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 16:49:14 +0100

On 12/22/2011 04:27 PM, Florian Limberger wrote:
>> The general consensus is that sprinkling icons everywhere actually
>> makes the interface far more complicated and distracting, and
>> generally quite *bad*. While there *are* some exceptions where icons
>> are more compact, they are rare.

Yupp. Don't wanna use 'em everywhere, but on some occasions, I think it
would be nice'ish to have the option.

>> Consider the meter widgets people are obsessed with putting on their
>> status bars to tell you, say, the quality of your wifi signal. In 12
>> horizontal pixels you can very comfortably fit in two digits, which
>> would tell you the signal as a percentage. The same number of pixels
>> would, as a meter, offer only an tenth of the information, and it
>> would be far more difficult to distinguish 80% from 70%. Yes, text is
>> quite a concise medium.
>
> then how do you distinguish the percentage of battery load and the
> percentage of wifi signal strength? Sometimes, I don't care if wifi
> signal quality is exactly 87% or 78%, It would suffice if I knew if it
> is over 25%, 50% or 75% ...

+1 If I want more information, I can haz it in a submenu.

> Plus, I don't have to think about if I'm looking at my battery or my
> wifi status, thats something where pictures are a little bit better.

+1 Actually, I think it's even easier on the brain to distinguish two
battery icons than the strings 50% and 75%. The brain is rather
effective at reading, still I think it requires some sophisticated
parsing and consciousness to do it. It's the whole analogue vs digital
clocks argument.

> But if you are paving the whole UI with icons, it gets confusing, but
> same applies to textual information, if you write a huge string with
> shitloads of information into your status bar, it would be confusing too.
> So I think, minimalism is the most important design goal, wether using
> icons or text to display information.

+1

> But for a project like dwm, whose focus lies on a simple implementation,
> icons would be simply to complicated to include.

Ok. Just thought, since awesome does it: how hard can it possibly be? ;P
dtk
Received on Thu Dec 22 2011 - 16:49:14 CET