New property proposal for StatusNotifierItem protocol: Label

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hey Ted,

On Tuesday 10 August 2010 20:40:20 Ted Gould wrote:
> It seems to me that most of them can be handled adequately by adding the
> label, so implementing or adopting a new API simply more complex than
> what we need.

From my experience (I'm maintaining the battery applet, which has the 
percentage written on top of it in the system tray area), you're running into 
a host of problems doing that. Let's have a look:

- contrast, depending on the icon theme, text on the icon might be readable, 
  or not
- space: At 96dpi (and there aren't many users with less than that out there), 
  you can at most put 3 chars into the standard size of 22px, that's if you 
  want to keep it readable of course. This won't work for weather information, 
  for example.
- localisation: While some things might fit in there in the English version, 
  they won't in other localications where the text is often wider, even if 
  it's just a number the local representation often differs (think time, 
  am/pm, percentages can be different, ...)

IOW, you have to be really restrictive there when it comes to 
what to put on there, and then people will still come up with things like 
scrolling text, or whatever. (Hmm, <marquee> ... ;)

So I've fixed issues on that "text on icon" display for two years, all those 
problems went away when we put the text into tooltips, and it was all way more 
consistent.

I suggest you rethink using tooltips, they're really damn useful ;-)
-- 
sebas

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