Re: Combined system status updates

[Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek gentoo org>]

On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 1:25 AM, Allan Day <allanpday gmail com> wrote:
> Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek gentoo org> wrote:
> If anyone is interested in this, check out the examples [1]. On a
> laptop with a single user account and VPN, I count eight menu items,
> for example.
>
> > I beg to differ there! On my laptop with its default setup, I would
> > see 13 items + 5 separators on the menu at all times (increasing to 14
> > with updates).
>
> Can you explain how you came up with those numbers? Do you have
> multiple VPNs/Mobile Broadband connections? I'm not sure that 5
> separators will even be possible...

I miscounted the separators, sorry about that! 4 is the correct
number. My network bits look like this:

* WiFi (displayed if device is capable)
* Mobile Broadband (USB 3G dongle, connected)
* VPN1 (Work VPN)
* Bluetooth (Switched on at boot)

And I have a "Guest" user on my system for people who want to use my
machine, so that adds the "Switch user" and "Logout" options. That
makes it 13, by my count—unless I've misunderstood something about the
menu? This isn't the average case, but it's not an atypical case
either.

FWIW, I know it's a bad idea for non-designers to give design
suggestions, but it seems to me that splitting the network menu might
be a nice thing to do.

> > Do we have a mechanism for "scrolling" (or its equivalent) when the
> > menu length exceeds the screen height? How would this interact with
> > scroll bars inside sub-menus? Is such a mechanism desirable?
>
> GTK+ menus can certainly scroll when they reach the limit of the
> available space. I'm not sure about St ones, but that should be
> possible. That said, scrolling a menu isn't a great thing and I'd like
> to think that we can avoid it. According to my rough calculations, a
> menu with 13 items in it (which would be pretty rare) would be about
> 550px tall.

I'm glad you agree that scrolling the menu should be avoided! It's bad
for both touch screens and mouse pointers. I would also posit that a
large menu is hard to navigate using a mouse pointer.

--
~Nirbheek Chauhan

Gentoo GNOME+Mozilla Team