Re: Icons during dragging (should have text part IMHO)

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 16:00 +1000, Peter Harvey wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 10:38, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > > This actually goes nicely along with the paper written a couple of years 
> > > back about color used in feedback from apps (ie: a download icon would
> > > turn red when stalled or at low speed, green at higher speeds).
> > 
> > Somebody actually wrote a paper advocating alienating 20% of your users?
> 
> I assume that's a reference to colour blindness? Can I suggest that in
> this case, the icon should go from 0% to 100% saturation, AND 0% to 100%
> contrast. That is, icon starts as a solid grey outline of the original
> icon, and slowly gains colour and contrast.
> 
> This would cover everyone (I think), and will still work for icons which
> have little colour content. Almost all icons have contrasting levels of
> brightness.

Varying brightness levels won't generally be a problem for color-blind
users, although people do tend to have less sensitivity to contrast as
they get older.  I was mostly reacting to the idea of switching an icon
between red and green.  Not only would that be a use of color indicators
when other means are available, but it's quite possibly the worst two
colors that could be suggested.

In general, I think having an icon "fade in" while the file is written
would be slick from an eye-candy perspective, but I question its actual
usefulness.  If I don't have the fully-rendered copy right next to it,
how do I know what the finished state looks like?

Super-imposing a progress bar on the file would be much more useful.
When I look at a progress bar, I can immediately tell how far along it
is, to a certain degree of accuracy.  A fade-in effect on top of that
could look really nice, as long as it didn't get in the way.  (Please
don't start it at 0%, though!)

I've advocated super-imposing progress bars on files in the past, and I
still think it would be a Good Thing.  I want it for a more general case
than just copying files within Nautilus, though.  It would be great if
any program that writes files (particularly those that download files)
could plug into Nautilus for this.  Anybody with a good solution to this
will get a big Attaboy from me.

--
Shaun