[hobbit] Status Icons

[s_aiello at comcast.net]

On Monday 11 August 2008 12:25:11 Josh Luthman wrote:
> You have art skills!
>
> I really think we need to make the difference between the 24h time period.
> They're barely noticeable right next to each other.  Maybe make the older
> changes animate?
>
The *-recent icons are animated, they pulse (shrink in size, grow in size, 
pause, repeat). I animated the *-recent so that your eye would be drawn to an 
report that had recently changed status. So even if the status is green, 
people would ask, ".. Oh something happened there", and dig into it. In my 
configuration the BBGENOPTS is set to "--recentgifs=2h" instead of 24h. My hope 
is that the Hobbit display page's majority of icons are the not animated. A 
page full of animated icons would be visual chaos. 

The only major part I do not like is that hobbit's event log uses the *-recent 
icons. So lots of pulsing there, looking at that for a period of time sets me 
on edge. I could hack the source and change that..  but I would need to do 
that for every hobbit release...  and i try to make as few hack changes as i 
can.

> The symbols there are acceptable, however, I would expect those who are
> colorblind using large displays on the wall won't really see the shapes
> well.
With only 16x16 pixels there is only so much that can be done and there are 
only so many different shapes. I did consider using the psychic flash card set 
(circle, star, wavey lines, etc), but again 16 pixels and trying to avoid 
jaggy lines.  There is always the possibility of increasing the image size, 
but then you lose the ability to display a large amount of information on the 
screen. So there is a fine line. I have seen NOCs in the past use Browsers that 
allow you to increase page size (text & images), or the large screen monitors 
resolution set to a lower resolution (1024x768 / 800x600). 

Again I am not pushing these icons, they suite my needs fine (though sometimes 
I wish the animate pause was longer). If people want to use them they are 
welcomed. And if there is demand I can create an update, I am just too lazy to 
make those small changes just for myself ;)

 ~Steve