GnuCash page on GO site

[Linas Vepstas]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2004 at 01:00:39PM +0000, Calum Benson was heard to remark:
> On Thu, 2004-02-26 at 06:02, Linas Vepstas wrote:
> 
> > In my particular need (I cannot speak in generality on this), 
> > I want to have a list of items, on say, a neutral background,
> > and some of the items on the list are in (for example) green, 
> > to indicate that they're 'in progress' and going well, and some
> > others in red, indicating that an alarm has gone off, and need 
> > attention now.  
> 
> Right... but if one of the columns in the list was some sort of status
> icon or progress indicator, that would make the colour redundant, which
> is good for everyone, not just people with accessibility needs. (E.g the
> user now potentially has the ability to sort the list by status, which
> may or may not be useful in your case.)  

Well, no. The icon/progress indicator is much too small. You have to 
focus your eyes to see it (literally).  You can't just stand at the 
other end of the room, glance at the screen and get the status;
you have to push your nose to the glass and focus and look for the 
icons/progress bars.

On the other hand, a red bar, blinking even, is more effective:
you're shootin the shit with office mates out in the hallway,
drinkin coffee, you glance in through the office door, and see
blinking red on your desktop -- holy shit, the sky is falling,
gotta run now!  

I really wasn't joking about that movie crash-landing scene.
People really do build real-life systems like that for a reason.
>From the user-interface point of view, there are times when
you really want the GUI to scream at you, be in your face, 
instead of having a weeny little icon/progress bar in a little
cell in a table.

> In conjunction with an "only use colours from theme" mode in your app,
> in which the user would have to rely on this status indicator alone,
> you'd be pretty much HIG-friendly, I think.

Well, that's what I mean. I asked for a critical, gotta-have feature, 
and the answer was "were not gonna do it because its not HIG friendly".
Which is the same answer I got last time :-(

> > Flashing red even. 
> 
> Flashing bad... would almost certainly need to be turned off by default,
> for accessibility if not sanity reasons :)

Maybe you've not been in a trading room or control room or hosptial
ICU.  These places can have one operator staring at ten or twenty 
monitors.   Its really easy to miss a status change on one of the
screens; so if its an important status change, it blinks, and if its
really important, its wired to a buzzer.  Literally.  Hospital ICU's
beep like the f**-all.  Sanity is less important than immediate 
action.

--linas

-- 
pub  1024D/01045933 2001-02-01 Linas Vepstas (Labas!) <linas at linas.org>
PGP Key fingerprint = 8305 2521 6000 0B5E 8984  3F54 64A9 9A82 0104 5933