Almost vindicators - replacing the status bar

Recently, Shuttleworth wrote on his blog about the Windows , a promising mechanism that should replace the status bar in many applications of the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10. In the future, windindicators should provide a single mechanism to alert the user about the state of the program and its interaction. A couple of months ago, we also faced the problem of redundancy in the status bar. One of our applications had a specific type of status line (it can be clearly seen in the screenshots in this topic ), which took up a lot of space, while bringing little benefit. Unfortunately, then Mark had not yet published his plans, and the solution had to be found by ourselves, of course, taking into account existing samples.


We liked how the user is notified about the network status of Kde4, Gnome2 and Windows 7: all of their “applets” have menus with large two-line elements of available actions and current status. In our program, we assigned the upper right corner under the status bar and placed a set of icons in it (each individual program uses its own subset of this set).

• Each icon corresponds to its subsystem.
  

  Status bar for four subsystems

  
  
  
• On top of each icon, a sub-icon of the subsystem status can be displayed (Mark suggested multichromatic icons and color coding of the status).
• By clicking on the status bar, more detailed information on all subsystems is displayed (in Gnome, pressing initiates the display of a menu for an item under the cursor, but we do not have a menu, so all statuses are displayed together).
  

  Detail Status

  
  
  
• For the touch interface, the window with the details is removed by timeout or by clicking in any other place.
• For the mouse, drillthrough also appears when it is held in the notification area.

The final view of the status bar in the window

This solution allowed us to save valuable space and keep the user up to date with the system.

Icon Set - Oxygen. The project is fo2rist . The implementation is enemy.