An important, controversial issue!

[Sean Egan]

On 4/25/07, Dale Worley <dworley at pingtel.com> wrote:
> The biggest problem is "How easily can a new user figure out what the
> status icons mean?"  I suspect that without prior knowledge, *all* of
> the icons are arbitrary.  Are there proper rollover popups or some such
> so one can easily discover what the clock icon is supposed to mean?
> Once that is taken care of, I expect that 95% of the users won't even
> notice that they can't figure out what the metaphor is.

Yes, they are.

Luke (and others, but Luke is the most persistent) and myself, both
claim that both a clock (the current Pidgin away icon) and a piece of
paper (the Gaim away icon) *can* be identified as 'away,' but Luke (et
al) claim that it can be more easily, incorrectly identified as
"idle." This may not be an issue for people who come from an MSN or
Yahoo background, but the argument is that long-term Gaim users will
be confused by this.

Neither Luke and I are seeing much support for that claim here. If you
agree that this is potentially confusing, speak up!