[Usability] tabbed ui state indicators

[Stefan Kost <ensonic hora-obscura de>]

hi,

just subscribed to this list and searched the archive. I'd like to bring a topic 
into discussion which I have for long on my list. In the past (gnome-1.x) I was 
using multi-gnome-terminal a lot. And one feature of it I liked a lot was that 
it was coloring the label on the notebook tabs to indicate the state of the 
document (terminal) in it. States where : running command and new output. There 
is a request for this feature for the gnome-terminal in 2.x:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=132173

I belive this is easy to implement. What we might need is some suggestions in 
the Gnome HIG how to handle it.
My first suggestion is to use spinning arrows to indicate that the document that 
the tab stands for is not idle, thus is saving or is beeing processed. The 
progress (if known) + a desription of the action can be put into the tooltip for 
the tab.
As a second suggestion we could use icon-overlays to indicate the change state 
(adding a yellow up-side-down triangle with an '!' to indicate new output or 
other changes).
Any comments. Should we discuss this on the wiki?

Ciao
  Stefan
--
http://www.buzztard.org