Mysterious, unlabeled icons on disk volumes
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
gnome-disk-utility (Ubuntu) |
Confirmed
|
Low
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
Just one of the fourteen disk volumes on my machine is displayed with a star and a triangle in the lower-right corner (screenshot attached). These icons are unlabeled, do not have hover text, are not self-explanatory, and do not appear to respond to left or right mouse clicks. Furthermore, there is no sign of a Help menu within the Disks window or application menu. I have no idea what these icons mean.
ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
Package: gnome-disk-utility 3.6.1-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSign
Uname: Linux 3.5.0-26-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelMo
ApportVersion: 2.6.1-0ubuntu10
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sat Apr 6 08:46:11 2013
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/
InstallationDate: Installed on 2012-09-29 (188 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" - Beta amd64 (20120926)
MarkForUpload: True
SourcePackage: gnome-disk-utility
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
Also suffering this UI bug of sort, also on Ubuntu 12.10.
On my machine, four of the eight partitions are displayed with a star.
The right-pointer triangle appears when the partition is mounted, so it's probably meant as a "media play" metaphor.
The star usually means "new" (irrelevant here), or "preferred" (also irrelevant here). It's not correlated with the filesystem type of the partition.
It's most probably a feature, but certainly fails most reasonable human interface guidelines.
For example, Gnome guidelines about tool bars ( https:/ /developer. gnome.org/ hig-book/ 3.0/toolbars- labels- tooltips. html.en ) mention:
> Every control that appears on your toolbar should have a tooltip, whether or not that control has an associated text label. The tooltip should be a concise description of the control, but should provide more information than its text label where possible. For example, Open an existing document, or Undo last operation.
About icons ( https:/ /developer. gnome.org/ hig-book/ stable/ icons.html. en ):
> Icons are a graphical metaphor presenting a visual image that the user associates with a particular object, state or operation. When a user sees a good icon they are immediately reminded of the item it represents, whether that be an application in the panel menu or the "right aligned" state in a word processor toolbar.
These star and triangle icons in gnome-disks fail at these sentences.
Regards,