On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 04:27:35PM +0100, Florian Limberger wrote: > 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% ...
A one-letter prefix doesn't help you? b50% s70%? I don't even do that much. I used to just have it read, e.g., 50% 70% and I used my amazing pattern-recognition skills to discern that the battery life was mysteriously always first in that list! Now I let my battery LED turn orange to remind me to plug in (I can run a script in a terminal if I care about exact percentage) and I just report my current essid. > 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. > If I denote the textual percentage with letters, it would cost me some > pixels too, so I think thats a rather weak 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. If you look at the same series of information every day for a month and are still confused by it, you may want to invest in some Apple products, or at least install Arch Linux. > So I think, minimalism is the most important design goal, wether using > icons or text to display information. > By the way, I think the "general consensus" applies only to this > mailing > list, the rest of the world (sane or not) believes in some usability > bonus. I don't find cartoons more usable than information. I don't, along the same lines, give a shit what the rest of the world thinks. The rest of the world has chosen an interface. They're free to wallow in it while I use something more effective.
