On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 17:49, Matthew Paul Thomas
<mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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Vishnoo wrote on 17/10/10 11:39:
>...
> We removed tooltips from gnome-panel and indicators because it did not
> add much value[1] and instead we choose to use icons that could quickly
> convey the same meaning.
>...
> Is there a reason Unity's Launcher has tooltips for applications and
> places? [While Application icons could be considered as unrecognizable,
> Places icons are our custom icons so they should atleast be a bit
> recognizable.Still not sure how these tooltips are more important...]
>...
For the most part, menu title icons convey pretty simple ideas. Network,
sound, keyboard, power. And they stick around for a long time, so you
can learn them.
Launcher items sometimes are simple items, but sometimes complex ones.
And often they don't stick around as long. For instance, you might
install a bunch of free programs that do the same thing, to compare them
before keeping just one, and their icons may look alike. That makes text
labels more useful for them.
i'd suggest going through the Ayatana Indicator Menus for cases of mutual exclusion.
If you e.g. remove "Available" from the Me Menu and display
[ON|OFF] Chat
[ON|OFF] Busy Mode
[ON|OFF] People
instead.
"Stand By" aka AFK aka Away would be an automatic Presence state that fades slow enough for the user to actually notice.
I'm mentioning this in the context at hand, because you need less explanatory text i.e. text labels, if you have dynamic menu items like [on|off] toggles¹ for example or mutually exclusive items such as "connect|disconnect", "show|hide" or "maximize|restore" or "mute|unmute"
Contact List itself would be more useful if one could dock it to a desktop corner and remove the window decoration. At least " Context Menu > Information|Edit" should open a docked information field, instead of that currently existing tooltip which obscures the very list i'm trying to look at aggressively upon mouse over imo.. The greatest bug is that Contact List's tooltips afford urls in blue, underlined, i.e. for interaction, but you can't click on them, because they are non-interactive tooltips.
Tooltips are more useful if they are interactive, that's why i like the term you chose: text labels.
And a label is usually beside it's parent button, not obscuring other buttons. Imagine doorbells:
they have name-labels attached to them, usually sideways, not obscuring other buttons in the list.
Or do you mean something else with text labels?