Re: panel notification area -- not many apps

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Tue, 2003-03-04 at 00:49, Alan wrote:
> 
> Based on what I know of human interface guides, the icon should stay
> where it is, and not dissapear, so that a user knows where it is. 

Funnily enough, I was thinking about this the other day, but I couldn't
really think of a clear guideline.  You'd really want a "new mail"
notification icon to disappear as soon as you've cleared your new mail,
for example, there's no point in it hanging around.  But then you have
the problem of how to get it at its context menu when it's disappeared,
so we also need good guidelines about what sort of things should go on a
status icon's context menu. :)

The clearest distinction I could come up with is icons that tell you
about binary events (you do/don't have new mail, you are/aren't still
logged into your chat client), and icons that tell you about a range of
events (your network connection is currently
idle/sending/receiving/both).  Seems to me the icon should disappear in
the former case and remain there all the time in the latter case, if we
are to allow the latter type in the notification area at all... opinion
seems to be split on that.

(FWIW, I also have a theory that if a notification icon doesn't have a
parent application-- which includes capplets in this case-- from whose
Preferences window it can be turned on or off, then it should probably
be an applet or something and not a notification icon.)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems