De-cluttering the icon bar

Had a chat with a few people at Wakefield about this, so thought I’d throw it open here and see what people think.

Thinking back to RISC OS 2, most people had hard drives numbering an integer between 0 and 1 inclusive. Some even had Econet. This meant that you had a maximum of 4 file system icons if you had a RAM disk configured (hard disk, floppy, RAM and NetFS). The vast majority of RO2 systems had one floppy, so only a single icon on the left side.

Fast forward a few years. My 4-slicer had 2 CD drives (one reader, one writer), 2 SCSI drives, 2 IDE drives, floppy drive, NetFS, ShareFS disks, Omniclient NFS mounts, and then some. In short, on a 1152×864 screen (a peculiar resolution that meant you could retain 15bpp colour, going to 1280×1024 meant dropping to 8bpp) the left side of the icon bar stretched halfway across the screen.

The situation on the Pi isn’t much different by the time I’ve mounted all the LanMan shares with Omni. And that’s on a 1280×1024 monitor in 24bpp.

So, my proposal was this. Have a configure option to “collapse drives”. This will shrink everything down to a single icon, let’s call it “Disks”. (Or “Discs”, if you prefer, I’m not bothered.)

Clicking on the Disks icon pops up a menu with “Fixed disks”, “Removable disks” and “Network drives”. All available disks or shares then appear in the relevant submenu.

If having a menu open on a left-click is too much of a deviation from the Style Guide, how about having a left-click open a window displaying a list of available disks/shares (think in a similar manner to “Computer” in Windows, but with a RO flavour), and a middle-click opens the menu to allow you to browse through available disks.

I’m thinking this could have 3 configurable options:

1. Don’t collapse at all and use the traditional behaviour.
2. Collapse when the number of drive icons exceeds a configured threshold, say 5 or more.
3. Always collapse.

The other “de-clutter”, which I think has been mentioned here before, would be to provide a configuration option to hide the Display Manager icon. On an IOMD system it might still be needed (2MB max VRAM), but on something modern like a Pi you can always have 24bpp colour. Plus with modern flat-panel monitors you need to run them at their native resolution otherwise you get nasty scaling artefacts.

You’d still be able to get to the “display mode” dialogue through Configure, of course.

Again, I would stress that my proposal is for both the above things to be configurable by the user.

Would be interested on people’s opinions of this anyway.

Is this partly what !MiniDisc does? It’s available here and appears to be Iyonix-safe so may well run on newer hardware.

Just about to say the same thing as andym! riscos.info claims 7th software maintains !MiniDisc, but I think that might be an error. ROOL Steve will be able to tell us…

I don’t recall adopting MiniDisc. That’s not to say I wasn’t asked in an email aeons ago and have since forgotten… :) I certainly don’t remember ever using MiniDisc, although the idea has always been a good one (IMHO) to collapse drives/discs under a single iconbar icon.

Shows how long I’ve been away from the RO scene. I’m glad I bought a Pi now.

!PRINTERS is another candidate for iconbar declutter. Perhaps only the active printer should show on the iconbar; clicking it could produce a window showing all the other configured printers. And that window could so-usefully show details such as what paper size is in effect, without having to open a sub-pane. In 2011 Robert Kirton (“Tank”) produced a prototype 2.00 of a !Printers front-end that took this sort of approach; I used it for a while until for some reason it started crashing.

I must admit Jim I still use it on my Iyonix/Beagle/Pi’s so why it crashes for you I don’t know…
The main problem with releasing/submitting this version is that it combines the ROOL !Printers (USB bits) and the ROL version (Extra trays/options mainly) that was released onto Sourceforge, so there are licensing issues (as well as I never really finished it off).

And an admission on my part, following yours: At the time, my main machine was the RiscPC, and that’s where I had these aforementioned crashes. I’ll try your version now on my Iyonix and newish-to-me Armini.
¶ [Ohhh, licensing issues. So often such a dog-in-the-manger dampener on development: Aesop’s dog doesn’t want to eat the nice hay but snaps at any other animal that is starving for it.] [[And would anybody going off on the licensing tangent please start a new thread.]]

¶ [Ohhh, licensing issues. So often such a dog-in-the-manger dampener on development: Aesop’s dog doesn’t want to eat the nice hay but snaps at any other animal that is starving for it.] [[And would anybody going off on the licensing tangent please start a new thread.]]

Stir much? (^_^)

I like the idea of decluttering by combining drives, and the printers idea is good too. Once I have several ShareFS drives and some USB drives from a card reader with 4 slots, it starts getting ridiculous.

I would much prefer a design where a click on a sole “drives” icon on the iconbar would open something that looked as much like a Filer window as possible. The icons within that could operate as the current drive icons do, so the menu would lead to Format, Free etc. There could be a “Full info” view like in the Filer, which would display the free space for each drive, and the format type and so on. You could perhaps choose to have some of them on the iconbar itself, a bit like the way ShareFS “Show discs” works.

I like the idea of decluttering by combining drives, and the printers idea is good too. Once I have several ShareFS drives and some USB drives from a card reader with 4 slots, it starts getting ridiculous.

Like MiniDisc.?

Not tested it on ARMv7

I wouldn’t be to keen on a window like ShareFS show discs appearing as I see the iconbar as a menu like thing not a window like thing. I use tinydir a lot because I prefer scrolling the iconbar to access files/progs I’m using frequently rather than putting them in a folder and opening the folder from the iconbar.

I would like to see Iconbar grouping where you can drag one iconbar icon over another and it creates a group. Hovering over the group icon or pointing to the group and moving up opens another iconbar above the current one with the grouped icons. You can rearrange items on the iconbar by dragging and dragging the last item out of a group destroys the group. In the group Select and Adjust do whatever they do now and close the group window, Menu opens the icon’s menu. Moving the pointer outside the group window closes the window. First item in a group becomes the group icon and clicking on the group icon works as if you were clicking on that icon.

That way I can put frequently used discs on the iconbar and the rest in a group.