An important, controversial issue!

[Chris Stafford]

Mark Doliner wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Apr 2007 14:48:30 -0400, Nathan Walp wrote
>   
>> 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).
>>     
FWIW I got completely confused for about a week when I had to switch to
using the MSN official client, and I can't see any logic to either the
clock or the bit of paper. If idle still makes things go grey in Pidgin
I doubt it will be too confusing, and the clock picture looks a wee bit
classier than the paper.

cheers
chris.