Planet Geek

Tooltrays. Why did it have to be tooltrays?

Geekitude

Seems simple enough. Put an icon in the tooltray to notify you when ther eare updates for your OS. Ubuntu and others have outstanding package management, this is just the next step.

Oh look, it's showing me a ! - must be updates. *double-click*

Bzzt, bad UI experience! 10yd penalty! Click once, get the "please type your password". Double click? You get TWO "please type your password" dialog boxes.

There's a serious level of inconsistency in tooltray management on Linux desktops. I suspect some of it comes from the slow convergence of KDE and Gnome based tools, each having 'their own way' of doing things, but I have no baseline from which to make a safe assumption about what to do with a tooltray icon. Do I double-click it? Single? Right click? Each application is different.

So close! :)

Posted by dbs at June 26, 2007 4:22 PM