Comment 144 for bug 527458

On 11.05.2010, 17:39 +0000 Dmitrijs Ledkovs wrote:
> What infomration are you missing in the current desktop?
>
> A few things already identified
>
> 1) Time left until battery charged
> 2) UbuntuOne syncing, up-to-date, failed
>
> Anything else?
>

More tooltips that I like in Karmic:
3) number of available package updates
4) current up/download speeds of p2p client
5) master volume level
6) weather, temperature, wind (clock and weather applet)
7) harddisk names for temperature displays (sensors applet)
8) number of objects in the trashcan (trashcan applet)

Well, without the tooltips the answers are just one or two clicks away.
So it would still be possible to work with Gnome even without tooltips.

I have another argument against menus replacing tooltips:
Hovering a few pixel off the target just shows the wrong tooltip. But
clicking off the target may start your IDE or Firefox with 20 tabs, may
close a window or deselect a dozen carefully selected icons.

Please think again before declaring tooltips as visual clutter. Knowing
the Commodore 64 we could also argue that the mouse pointer is visual
clutter. And removing it will be the future - just ask an iPad owner!

I bet there are better ideas to improve usability of Gnome.