Hobbit colors/icons 🔗 link

This is changing into a genral discussion about colors and icons, I
think...

Let's just use the Sony playstation icons? ;)

But seriously:

In general, I only want something to blink that requires immediate
attention.
And I want things that are in a 'normal' state to be pretty blended into
the background.

Less noise.


But to accommodate for people with color-blindness, as well as inform
others about functions of certain colors is not a bad idea at all.

Let me first phrase what I personally would like each state to be like. 

To me, the longterm green state should be something that almost blends
into the background. The recent green should only differentiate from
it's normal state, but hardly be noticed among other colors. It is the
good thing to have, so it needs to be unobtrusive.

The recent blue state, I would assume is set by a colleague or myself
for a reason, so it also should blend in the background. However, if a
blue state is staying for a while, I want someone to notice and check up
on it, to see if this is correct.

A recently red state should attract my attention, as well as a recent
yellow state. But a longterm red state should practically be screaming
at me and be as annoying as possible! Also a longterm yellow state
should encourage me to make the problem go away. So all of these should
at least have some form of blinking or movement to catch your eye, maybe
slow breathing for the first 24 hours, then fast and at irregular
intervals when they stay for too long. 

Purple I have my doubts about. Of course it's bad when a check does not
function properly. But at least to me, it basically only means someone
forgot to start the hobbit/xymon client ;) I personally don't need much
blinking annoyance here, but I may be missing out on something.

And the 'clear' state is a complete puzzle to me. It gets used in the
'badtest' as a transient state before yellow, but also for checks that
are not configured (for example in a 'files' check with no files
configured). In the latter function I can imagine you want it to attract
attention, but in the first I'd have made it go to yellow if I wanted it
to attract attention. I have no solution for this.

And the unknown state being a questionmark seems pretty obvious.

As for the shapes that these checks should have, and even different
shapes for different states, so colorblind people can tell something is
going on:

I'd say just simple nice soft round shapes for green. Dark and bright
should be noticeable for colorblind.
Yellow is a danger thing, and very many countries use triangles or
diamond shapes to indicate danger in roadsigns. That is probably the way
to go.
Red and things that are very dangerous are often associates with thick
crosses (X-shape if you like)
Somehow I feel like a starshape would be nice for the purple states, but
can't really explain it.
And a square seems appropriate for the 'clear' (white/grey) one to me.
And of course the questionmark for the 'unknown'. Its just very
appropriate for this state that should not occur.

That's just my 2 cents.


-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: dOCtoR MADneSs [mailto:user-d54077869176@xymon.invalid] 
Verzonden: maandag 9 maart 2009 17:05
Aan: user-ae9b8668bcde@xymon.invalid
Onderwerp: Re: [hobbit] Another Theme (was Re: [hobbit] LED Theme for
Xymon)

Thanks again for your contribution. I don't have many time, so I submit
a request, if you can't/don't want to do it, i'll try to take time.
I think the colors are something good, but not enough. We should use a
set of icons more easy to interpert :
empty green circle : recent green
full filled green circle : green
blinking red cross (oriented like an X)  : recent red red cross
(oriented like an X) : red blinking  purple "?" : recente purple purple
"?" : recente purple Blue and purple are less important for me. What do
you think about this idea ? May be the purple and red difference between
recent and non-recent should be other than the one I described, but I
can't get time enough to mind about it ;)

[Cleaver, J.C.] 
Perhaps we're thinking too discretely on this. How about an
SVG-generated (or pick of many pre-generated images) on a continuum of
noticability? For example, a recently OK service could be based around a
bright green -say, #00FF00- which slowly changes over the course of the
next 24-48 hours to a #339933 icon (or whatever the background color
is). Instead of simply "important" and "static" icons, let the display
generator gradually modify the annoyance of a given problem.

[Cleaver, J.C.] 
I agree that that's usually the only problem, but I think it's
definitely something that should be given annoyance. In my experience, a
"dead client" is often just waiting on something; caused by either a
disk full condition, a hung NFS mount, or something else I do actually
care about. But even if it died for no reason, that's still a "blind
spot" in your monitoring and is IMHO dangerous.

-jc

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Kip, D. - GDI/SNB wrote:

Personally, I find blinking icons to be quite a problem. I usually have
a tab open on my browser on the bb2.html page, and the blinking icons
can cause major problems for the CPU on some devices (especially my Atom
based netbook, or other low power devices). Previously I replaced my
icons with the nb (non-blinking) versions, but just thought I might add
my voice to the discussion on avoiding animated icons for any state...

ie, I monitor all my customer DSL connections, but when some major
supplier goes offline, I end up with a stack of red status on my screen,
so 200 red flashing animated icons causes a lot of CPU consumption (or
so it seems)....

I really like the idea of using slowly changing colours, though perhaps
it should be very bright immediately, fade to 50% over the next x hours,
and then go back to very bright... ie, it should start obvious (your
disk just failed, panic now!) and then if you don't react, then it
probably isn't so important (fades), if it has been bad for a long time,
then it should get brighter/more annoying again. This could be done
without images by using the HTML graphics as seen in the history graphs
(history uptime). Then you just need a config to say start at #xxxxxx
and move to #yyyyyy over xx minutes and then move to #zzzzzz over yy
minutes and then stay there....

BTW, I wonder if HTML flash uses less CPU than animated images....

Regards,
Adam

- --
Adam Goryachev
Website Managers
www.websitemanagers.com.au
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