An important, controversial issue!

[Nathan Walp]

Sean Egan wrote:
> 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!

Clock = idle in my head.  Away-ness has never been, to me, time-related. 
  The only time when time comes into the equation is away vs 
extended-away, where extended-away means you're gonna be gone longer 
(for some definition of longer).

-Nathan