Some Eclipse Foundation services are deprecated, or will be soon. Please ensure you've read this important communication.

Bug 371007

Summary: using favorites icon as a toggle state
Product: [ECD] Orion Reporter: Susan McCourt <susan>
Component: ClientAssignee: Project Inbox <orion.client-inbox>
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX QA Contact:
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: P3 CC: andrew.eisenberg, ken_walker
Version: 0.4   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: PC   
OS: Windows 7   
Whiteboard:

Description Susan McCourt CLA 2012-02-08 16:05:17 EST
We currently use the favorites icon for several things:
- when it's on the left of something in a list or menu, it means "this is a favorite"
- when it's in a row of commands, or in the page banner, or in a menu with "Make Favorite" it means "make this thing a favorite"

The rest of the world uses the star icon in a toggle mode, where a grayish star means "not a favorite" and then you push it and it means "now you are a favorite."

We should consider moving to this model.  It would require a toggling image state in the command framework.
Comment 1 Ken Walker CLA 2012-02-08 17:48:56 EST
Would we also need the capability to change the string in the command?  For example in the popup menu for a file/directory there's the star and "make favorite".   If it was already a favorite it should be "remove favorite" and the two stars should be different depending on state.
Comment 2 Susan McCourt CLA 2012-02-08 22:48:26 EST
(In reply to comment #1)
> Would we also need the capability to change the string in the command?  For
> example in the popup menu for a file/directory there's the star and "make
> favorite".   If it was already a favorite it should be "remove favorite" and
> the two stars should be different depending on state.

I would imagine that for a toggle state we'd have a tooltip for each state.
But even without a toggle state we have cases for contextual tooltips.

For example, I'd really like to see a tooltip like "Make this page a favorite" when the command is used in the banner, but maybe "Make this resource a favorite" when it's a selection, or maybe even single/plural.
Comment 3 Ken Walker CLA 2012-02-09 09:09:25 EST
And this one https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=366234
Comment 4 John Arthorne CLA 2012-02-09 14:40:31 EST
I agree having two icons would make sense. I had the same concern about confusion when I added the star icon in the Open Resource dialog. To help reduce confusion I did add a tooltip that simply said "Favorite". 

There could be a risk in some contexts of a grey icon appearing to be disabled - one option is a hollow star with yellow outline vs a solid star.
Comment 5 Susan McCourt CLA 2012-02-09 15:45:10 EST
(In reply to comment #4)
> I agree having two icons would make sense. I had the same concern about
> confusion when I added the star icon in the Open Resource dialog. To help
> reduce confusion I did add a tooltip that simply said "Favorite". 
> 
> There could be a risk in some contexts of a grey icon appearing to be disabled
> - one option is a hollow star with yellow outline vs a solid star.

agree.
I'm also starting to think that rather than wait for "generic toggle buttons" in the command framework we should just code up a little favorite toggle widget on its own.  Because the reality is that once it starts acting like a toggle, we will probably *not* want it in the command menus or mixed in with other commands.  It would probably go back on the left of the item name (as is done in gmail and others).

So I would say treat this as a special case...a toggling decorative element that can be optionally rendered any time we are showing a resource.

Seems to go nicely with Andrew's efforts for common rendering of resources....???
Comment 6 John Arthorne CLA 2012-02-10 11:53:41 EST
(In reply to comment #4)
> There could be a risk in some contexts of a grey icon appearing to be disabled
> - one option is a hollow star with yellow outline vs a solid star.

Thinking more about it, I'm not sure I believe myself here. In desktop world we often used grey for disabled icons, but on the web having grey icons that gain colour on roll-over is pretty common. I've never been confused by the grey stars in gmail or firefox now that I think of it.
Comment 7 Susan McCourt CLA 2012-02-10 11:59:01 EST
(In reply to comment #6)
> (In reply to comment #4)
> > There could be a risk in some contexts of a grey icon appearing to be disabled
> > - one option is a hollow star with yellow outline vs a solid star.
> 
> Thinking more about it, I'm not sure I believe myself here. In desktop world we
> often used grey for disabled icons, but on the web having grey icons that gain
> colour on roll-over is pretty common. I've never been confused by the grey
> stars in gmail or firefox now that I think of it.

I think it has to do a lot with where it appears.  In the browser bar or as a "tag" on a list item it's fairly self evident.  That's also why I think my original comment about " It would require a toggling image state in the command framework." was wrong, because I don't think this needs to render in a standard set of commands, it's kind of its own thingie.
Comment 8 Susan McCourt CLA 2013-01-08 13:03:42 EST
We are removing the star from the banner.  We now use it only to annotate favorites in open resource, so this is no longer an issue.