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
