[Usability] Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Rhythmbox tray icon - again

[Douglas McMorris <virage83 mail utexas edu>]

On Thu, 2003-08-28 at 21:34, Colin Walters wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> A number of people have complained about the recent change to Rhythmbox
> that removed the ability to completely hide the window (remove it from
> tasklist, etc) via the tray icon.  Seth Nickell made the suggestion that
> Rhythmbox pop up a menu on left click, which made a lot of sense to me,
> since I thought it would be what most people used the tray icon for.
> 
> It turns out that more people than I thought use the "minimize to tray"
> feature.  I don't personally use it, and I thought it was a little
> crack, so I was just going to ignore the requests to add it back.  
> 
> However, then someone pointed out to me that the GNOME CD player does
> this "minimize to tray" thing too.  Since there's precendent, that made
> me rethink things.  So this raises some questions:
> 
> 1) Is this feature total crack or not?  One concern - could it
> potentially be confusing to newbies who have accidentally hidden then
> window and then don't know how to get it back?
> 
> 2) If it's not crack, is it a good idea to do this on left click?
> 
> 3) Also if it's not crack, shouldn't we have some sort of standard
> terminology for this?  "Minimize to tray" doesn't sound good at all, and
> "Hide window" seems a little too weak.

yeah, the show window check box was pretty bad IMO

> Having posed the above questions, let me give my feelings:
> 
> 1) It's not (total) crack, at least for applications like music players
> which you use for a few seconds to pick a song and then want out of your
> hair.

couldn't agree more.

> 2) I think it's a bad idea to do this on left click.  It should happen
> via a context menu where the user has some clue about what's going on. 
> Also, I think it would be good to change the tray icon somehow to let
> the user know the window is hidden.

I like the left click thing my self, seems like some functionality
should be given to left click as its the primary way a user will be
discovering functionality.  I do see that hiding the window the first
time a user clicks on it would be a bit of a dramatic experience,
perhaps a warning dialog like aim or wmp use in windows when minimizing
to the systray would help.  As for the icon, definately, but I think
since the is the "notification area" we should notify the user of our
status with the icon... i.e. a playing icon, a paused icon, maybe a
simple icon for iradio.  All of these would need a similar look and feel
though so that the user knows its rb in every instance though.  perhaps
a simple bubble text of the next song when its started.... (with the
ability to disable this of course) would be nice too.

> 3) For lack of a better term, I would go with "[Hide/Show] Window".
> 
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-- 
Douglas McMorris <virage83 mail utexas edu>