New release of FUSA for the 2.13.3 GNOME release, complete with funky UI suggestions from Matthew Thomas, lots of i18n work, and fixed global *.png faces. Rock on, dear translators.
Confusing symbology invades this screenshot. It looks to me like your session is paused and that Tyler’s is playing. Even though I assume your session is happily running, just not on the display.
I can see some people getting very, very confused by this. Wouldn’t a simply bullet point to mark the selected entry suffice?
Blame mpt, who provided a convincing rationale for the use of play/pause icons when I implemented it, which runs roughly along the lines of “you want to explain the difference between background and forground processes?”
But that’s what’s needed here, icons to indicate foreground job, background job, and inactive, and Play/Pause/blank do that job. But I didn’t put a lot of effort into looking for better icons.
The trouble is that when you see something in a menuitem that isn’t a verb (or verb phrase), does that mean “make it like this”, or “this is how it is now, change it”?
This is why Apple’s guidelines have always said to use “Turn Foo On” / “Turn Foo Off”, instead of “Foo”, which could mean “turn foo on” (and makes the menuitem gain a checkmark), or “foo is on; turn off” (and makes the menuitem turn into “No Foo”).
So, above, does the “pause” icon mean “this user is paused; choose this item to un-pause”, or “choose this item to pause this user”? I don’t know.
The idea of having users’ sessions be “playing” or “paused” is an interesting one, but while the play/pause icons work great in Rhythmbox (where the global state is either “Playing” or “Paused”), I’m not sure how they map to an exclusive-grouping.
In addition to all of this, it is overloading the user with UI elements to comprehend. It’s all very unclear.
At this point I will bring up my thoughts on Usability Guys not always being right, because we can’t actually have that big red button in the middle of the screen marked “Do Stuff”. I certainly think a sparser interface would be simpler, even if it does avoid some clever metaphor about foreground sand backgrounds.
James! Your work is awesome… I’ve been using fusa since I found it forever ago and love it.
You should post screenshots of the newer version when the ui changes so we can see it before compiling it. Thanks.
There ya go
Confusing symbology invades this screenshot. It looks to me like your session is paused and that Tyler’s is playing. Even though I assume your session is happily running, just not on the display.
I can see some people getting very, very confused by this. Wouldn’t a simply bullet point to mark the selected entry suffice?
Blame mpt, who provided a convincing rationale for the use of play/pause icons when I implemented it, which runs roughly along the lines of “you want to explain the difference between background and forground processes?”
But that’s what’s needed here, icons to indicate foreground job, background job, and inactive, and Play/Pause/blank do that job. But I didn’t put a lot of effort into looking for better icons.
The trouble is that when you see something in a menuitem that isn’t a verb (or verb phrase), does that mean “make it like this”, or “this is how it is now, change it”?
This is why Apple’s guidelines have always said to use “Turn Foo On” / “Turn Foo Off”, instead of “Foo”, which could mean “turn foo on” (and makes the menuitem gain a checkmark), or “foo is on; turn off” (and makes the menuitem turn into “No Foo”).
So, above, does the “pause” icon mean “this user is paused; choose this item to un-pause”, or “choose this item to pause this user”? I don’t know.
The idea of having users’ sessions be “playing” or “paused” is an interesting one, but while the play/pause icons work great in Rhythmbox (where the global state is either “Playing” or “Paused”), I’m not sure how they map to an exclusive-grouping.
In addition to all of this, it is overloading the user with UI elements to comprehend. It’s all very unclear.
At this point I will bring up my thoughts on Usability Guys not always being right, because we can’t actually have that big red button in the middle of the screen marked “Do Stuff”. I certainly think a sparser interface would be simpler, even if it does avoid some clever metaphor about foreground sand backgrounds.
Icons on both sides, weird! Sure it seems like an idea worth trying but I dont it will really work in the long run.