fast-user-switch-applet

[Martin Soto]

On Fri, 2009-03-06 at 11:29 +0000, Mat Tomaszewski wrote:
> Nicolò Chieffo wrote:
> > quote from the blog:
> > "A couple of people have said that the menu looks “sparse” or “bare”
...
> The "less is more" philosophy is neither new, nor obsolete. I personally 
> believe that "less" and "more" can co-exist, but there's a very fine 
> line between "sparseness" and making your desktop look like an aircraft 
> cockpit. Ultimately, it all comes down to carefully considering every 
> single element of the UI in the broader context of overall look&feel, 
> use case scenarios etc.

Wholeheartedly agreed.

> I've got my part in the decision to remove the icons from the fusa 
> applet and I can see why it is controversial. I think part of that comes 
> from the fact that almost all other menus use icons, and there seems to 
> be lack of consistency.

The lack of consistency doesn't bother me, and I don't have any serious
aesthetic concerns with the menu, either. Still, I have personally noted
that I continuously have problems when using it. They may arise from the
fact that I was used to the older one, and grew accustomed to look for
the proper icon (which is faster) instead of reading through the
options. With this version, I always have to read the options carefully,
in order to make sure that I'm picking the right one. Indeed it happened
to me already a few times that I was in a hurry and selected the wrong
option. This can be quite bad, specially given the current broken state
of the GNOME session manager.

Of course, this is just anecdote so far, but it looks to me this may be
one of those cases where actual user testing would make a difference.

Cheers,

M. S.