Hey, On 22 December 2011 14:44, dtk <d...@gmx.de> wrote: > I just saw it > yesterday in awesome[0] and think it was a pretty neat feature to > display information in a compact yet intuitive way.
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. 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. I'm actually finding it difficult to think of any examples in which a widget is more compact than text. Nothing I have on my status bar would be, certainly. Thanks, cls
