unity-design team mailing list archive

[Chow Loong Jin <hyperair@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday 19,March,2010 08:54 PM, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> On 19/03/10 00:42, Chris Johnston wrote:
>> I have noticed that in Lucid, appindicators no longer have tooltip
>> popups.
> 
> For the moment, there are no tooltips on app indicators or system
> indicators. They have also been removed from window controls. Tooltips
> here had historically been poorly written and inconsistently used, we've
> removed them to see whether we can address the need for information
> through crisper, clearer app indicator icons.
> 
>> When on my laptop, running on battery, this adds two extra
>> steps for me to find out the status of my battery.
> 
> The indicator icon should show sufficient information. For batteries,
> the specification is quite detailed in defining which device or battery
> is represented (for example, in cases where you have a wireless mouse,
> wireless keyboard and the laptop battery itself) and how it should be
> represented. You should always know that you have at least a certain
> amount of time, just by looking at the icon.
> 
> Detailed information (hours and minutes of battery life per device) is
> available by clicking on the indicator. And very detailed interactions
> are supported, through the indicator, by bringing up the control panel
> itself.

When you explain it like that, it all seems well at first glance. But one use
case, and one I frequently used, for gnome-power-manager's tooltip was to leave
the cursor over it while performing other tasks that did not require the cursor
to be shifted from its position. By doing that, one could have real-time
(somewhat) estimates of the remaining time and percentage of remaining energy
left in the battery, as the tooltip would update on its own. With a menu, you
cannot do this, as the menu would grab keyboard focus.

In fact, tooltips have been traditionally used to describe whatever is pointed
to by the cursor. I would not consider gnome-power-manager's use of the tooltip
as "poorly written" or "inconsistently used". I would be rather tempted to
categorize the way application indicators use menus as misuse, rather than use,
considering menus have been traditionally used for housing a series of
clickable/activatable actions or a list of items to be chosen from, rather than
for displaying status.

-- 
Kind regards,
Chow Loong Jin (GPG: 0x8F02A411)
Ubuntu Developer

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