GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 140764
pad icons, so they are more clickable
Last modified: 2010-07-14 17:18:01 UTC
On large displays, the individual icons become hard to distinguish and the user is prone to hit the wrong "button" as they're so close together. (Meyer's and Fitt's Laws probably apply.) Allowing the user to set some gap between the icons would help a lot.
Rationalle: There are Some Number of easily-addressable (by a mouse) Regions on a mouse-pad, regardless of the screen's resolution. Making each icon (not the graphic only, but also the padding space around it) be no smaller than one of those Regions would enhance usability. ---- Don't make this a configurable value. Instead, use the size of the screen to infer how far apart icons should be.
> Instead, use the size of the screen to infer how far apart icons should be. Could you give an example? Suppose I have a 1024x768 screen, what padding should there be?
I'm hoping that a usability expert (I am but a coder) might have an answer as to how big of an area is easily reachable. Here's my first, untested guess: notification_icon_size = 16 #pixels size = min(screen_x_size_as_pixels, screen_y_size_in_pixels) magic_ui_areas = 32 #regions total_padding = max(0, (size / magic_ui_areas - notification_icon_size)) padding_per_side = floor(total_padding / 2) Results: 1600x1200 : 10 1280x1024 : 8 1024x768 : 4 800x600 : 1 640x480 : 0 Of course, magic_ui_areas is just a number I made up. A better formula may not be linear, or may take into consideration X' DPI value, mouse acceleration, or a configuration setting in Desktop Prefs->Accessability where the user can set her value in an Adroit<=========>Maladroit continuum.
I'm using 1600x1200 and still trying to make do with just one panel and I would absolutely hate it if we started wasting panel space by padding icons.
This is a maturity issue - Windows, Os X, just do things like this by default, no added complexity, settings, sliders, etc... The icons placed in the panel should have some amount of padding to create a cleaner look. Icons run into the vertical edges of the panel - my gut reaction is "unpolished." Will this make a difference in day to day use? Nope, but I do think it's a sign of maturity and polish. How bout 4-5 pixels of padding all the way around any icon placed in the panels so they don't run into top and bottom edges, or each other? -- A
583273 has a patch *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 583273 ***