Actually, I too feel comfortable with the flags. It makes it easy to distinguish from, say, my writing in US English and UK English. I'm not opposed to the idea of a different approach, but I have trouble thinking of another way to go about doing it.
Ryan
www.r-blog.com
That American flag
I would be unhappy if the flags disappeared, I do like the Union Jack at the bottom of my screen. Hmm.. though I would prefer the English flag.
Incidentally I believe it incorrect that the Union Jack is only so called when it's attached to a Royal Navy vessel. My understanding is that parliament back in 1908 stated "the Union Jack should be regarded as the National flag". Sorry I had to post that - but I felt compelled.
Graham J.
Incidentally I believe it incorrect that the Union Jack is only so called when it's attached to a Royal Navy vessel. My understanding is that parliament back in 1908 stated "the Union Jack should be regarded as the National flag". Sorry I had to post that - but I felt compelled.
Graham J.
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Please keep the flags, language country codes would probably take up more space and are not as quick to 'decode' as flags.charles wrote:So, we were thinking about changing the flag to use the standard language country codes. For example, US English will probably be "en_us" and British English would be "en_br".
-Charles
Possible changes to the status bar
Um... I'm not sure I see much complaint here about the presence of the icons, rather to the contrary, IMHO -- seems to be more about the 'stickiness' of the language setting. To me, there seems to be strong consensus that the icons are useful for quick reference, although in this context, I think that the flag is just about the only reliably distinguishable icon, in terms of its changing state, and purpose (at lease once you think about it.)
...oops, bit of a long one, sorry!
Charles, re changing or removing the icons, I take it you've had (or have!) complaints about the look of the icons? I can agree with you there, and it has seemed that these have not been the most obvious features.
On the aesthetic side, I do feel there's a problem with the icons being tightly squashed into the bottom status bar of the window; for a start it would really help to simply space them out a bit more (for reference, OmniWeb employs similar icons, and these feel quite comfortable in the window, when spaced comfortably.)
Care also needs to be taken, to balance the relative size of the icons, as they currently carry varying weight and visual prominence, which contributes to the somewhat cluttered and cramped feel to the status bar.
More radically, these icons and other contextual page info could be moved to a more compact ruler (see the System Text Ruler, OmniGraffle, xCode, Photoshop for its floating panel as a document properties bar etc.), and returning to v1's 'no status bar' window layout.
This could introduce the obvious drawback that these functions and the ruler must both be shown, to be able to access these features, but in fact the status bar could be moved as a bar, separate to, and above a slim lined ruler -- this can be seem quite effectively in OmniGraffle (at least the Pro version), although they include ruler unit controls in the ruler itself, leading to 'underutilised' space on the rest of the ruler, when these items could be optional, and counteract the slightly 'sprawling' toolbar feel.
After all that, it might be that you could offer the option to control the location of the status bar (top or bottom), but this may be going too far, and I can see your reasoning on the current location.
OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner (no, they're not the only apps I use!), also handle style/characteristic-based selection quite well, though in a more explicit (for the user), and much less space efficient method (see the Pro versions of these apps to see how you can select like formatted objects, it's not perfect, but it could be an interesting alternative, perhaps an additional palette option?)
Finally, the contextual commands attached to these icons could make logical additions to the contextual menus (i.e. right-click), to more closely associate the contextual-relevant functions, e.g. select all text with the same colour as the current selection (under the right-click).
Of course the icons would still be necessary, as these are the beakon that calls attention to the status of your documents.
...oops, bit of a long one, sorry!
Charles, re changing or removing the icons, I take it you've had (or have!) complaints about the look of the icons? I can agree with you there, and it has seemed that these have not been the most obvious features.
On the aesthetic side, I do feel there's a problem with the icons being tightly squashed into the bottom status bar of the window; for a start it would really help to simply space them out a bit more (for reference, OmniWeb employs similar icons, and these feel quite comfortable in the window, when spaced comfortably.)
Care also needs to be taken, to balance the relative size of the icons, as they currently carry varying weight and visual prominence, which contributes to the somewhat cluttered and cramped feel to the status bar.
More radically, these icons and other contextual page info could be moved to a more compact ruler (see the System Text Ruler, OmniGraffle, xCode, Photoshop for its floating panel as a document properties bar etc.), and returning to v1's 'no status bar' window layout.
This could introduce the obvious drawback that these functions and the ruler must both be shown, to be able to access these features, but in fact the status bar could be moved as a bar, separate to, and above a slim lined ruler -- this can be seem quite effectively in OmniGraffle (at least the Pro version), although they include ruler unit controls in the ruler itself, leading to 'underutilised' space on the rest of the ruler, when these items could be optional, and counteract the slightly 'sprawling' toolbar feel.
After all that, it might be that you could offer the option to control the location of the status bar (top or bottom), but this may be going too far, and I can see your reasoning on the current location.
OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner (no, they're not the only apps I use!), also handle style/characteristic-based selection quite well, though in a more explicit (for the user), and much less space efficient method (see the Pro versions of these apps to see how you can select like formatted objects, it's not perfect, but it could be an interesting alternative, perhaps an additional palette option?)
Finally, the contextual commands attached to these icons could make logical additions to the contextual menus (i.e. right-click), to more closely associate the contextual-relevant functions, e.g. select all text with the same colour as the current selection (under the right-click).
Of course the icons would still be necessary, as these are the beakon that calls attention to the status of your documents.