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.

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.

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.

I can see some people getting very, very confused by this. Wouldn’t a simply bullet point to mark the selected entry suffice?

You should post screenshots of the newer version when the ui changes so we can see it before compiling it. Thanks.