Emblems should have tooltips

[Daniel Silverstone]

It would be really handy if emblems had tooltips. So hovering over the "lock"
symbol on a read-only file would tell you that the file is read-only.

This would make a lot of the information-rich display nautilus can provide more
discoverable

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40551: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40551

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

There is already an upstream bug about this:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40551

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Would the design team recommend having tooltip for any emblem or only a selected set of standard ones? Could you suggest which ones and the tooltip to be used?

[6205 (6205-reactivated-deactivatedaccount)]

No tooltips are necessary for current Human emblems, because they suck badly. Tango or Gnome icon theme emlems are clearly recognizable and they also don't need no tooltips. Ubuntu needs new emblems, and maybe even a new, refined icon theme like beautiful 'Erectus' theme is. http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Erectus?content=100254 and not some lame tooltips..

[Mat Tomaszewski (mat.t.)]

My really long reply just got deleted because of the lost connection...

Summary:
We don't want tooltips whatsoever, to avoid the spiral: bad icon > bad emblem > we need a tooltip!
Let's rather fix the icons.

Marking the bug invalid.

[Daniel Silverstone (dsilvers)]

I think this is quite a sad approach to this. There's a *huge* wealth of information nautilus can display and can use emblems for.

Saying "we need the icons to be more inutitive" is good. But saying "Better icons negates the need for tooltips" is just plain wrong.

Many people have minds like mine. My mind works with words not with pictures. I actually find iconic picture-rich displays to be hard to understand unless I can get periodic reminders of what the images mean by hovering my mouse over them to get useful textual feedback.

Unfortunately many people are firm believers of the false adage that "it's inituitive once you're used to it" (sic) which has seemed to pervade the Gnome UI principles for quite some time.

[Daniel Silverstone (dsilvers)]

Just as a question which, hopefully, ought to highlight the difficulty of making "better icons" which would negate the need for tooltips...

How will you represent the information "This file is under revision control and has been locally modified but not added staged for commit"? This is a reasonable state for a file to be in if it is under git revision control.

Also, after you've come up with an answer for your particular pet locale, try again to make an icon which is pan-culturally similarly "intuitive".

Nautilus currently has sixteen icons which a person can, by hand, add to their icons. I can barely remember the icons for the time it takes me to glance back to this browser window. Yes the icons are poor, but that's not all the issue at hand.

If icons should always be perfect, then the logical conclusion would be to remove all toolbar modes but "icons only" and "fix the icons" -- most people would spend a lot of time hovering their mouse over the toolbar icons to try and learn what the icons mean, by using the helpful (and fortunately generally present) tooltips.

Remember, this is not a request to replace information, currently represented by icons, by text; but rather a request to make the icons discoverable. Discoverability ought to be a goal of any desktop environment, but particularly Ubuntu which keeps touting "Linux For Human Beings".

If it helps hammer the point home, consider point 3 of the Ubuntu philosophy:

Every computer user should be given every opportunity to use software, even if they work under a disability.

If Ubuntu has a visually rich, information dense, iconic display, then my own inability to think in pictures or spatially should count as a disability under that point, and you should be striving to ensure that people like me can discover the meanings in the UI and thus become productive with the software.

[david (davidelizondo2006)]

 fix error

[David Siegel (djsiegel-deactivatedaccount)]

david, why is this marked Fix Released? It does not appear fixed in Karmic.

[Vish (vish)]

This bug was initially marked invalid.

[Martin Mai (mrkanister-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

Marking as "triaged" since we have an upstream bug.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The dialog which has the issue got deprecated in GNOME3 in Oneiric, closing the bug