History window icons add clutter but provide little to no information.
@wjt
Submitted by Will Thompson Link to original bug (#670896)
Description
Created attachment 208496 Making the window extra-tall is revealing.
The History window shows a little icon between every entry in every list (with the exception of the top item in each list—Anyone/Anything/Anytime).
This is basically just noise in the Who list: the vast, vast majority of entries are people so the neat column of anonymous grey person icons adds nothing at all (and means that chatrooms, which have a two-anonymous-grey-person icon, don't stand out as different).
In the What list, it's kind of justifiable: this list serves a secondary purpose as a legend for the symbols which appear in the pane below it, and there are only 5 items in the list so the fact that three of them (“Calls”, “Incoming calls” and “Outgoing calls”) use the same green telephone icon is not too much of an eyesore. (It might be nicer to have little arrows for Incoming and Outgoing, but hey.)
But in the Where list, literally every item after “Anytime” has exactly the same icon which shows a calendar with a little 3 on it. But not every day of the month is the third of the month… So this is misleading visual noise, to my eye.
Some immediate suggestions:
• Get rid of the “person” item beside every person. Leaving the icon for chat rooms in place would make them stand out visually. • Add new icons to distinguish between incoming and outgoing calls. • Get rid of the [3] icons in the date list.
And longer-term:
• Make the items in the Who list look like contact list/Gnome Contacts items: chunkier slabs with the contact's name (not identifier), avatar and possibly status. • Maybe that pane should be a calendar widget which supports selecting a range of dates? Unfortunately, GtkCalendar doesn't support selecting more than one day at once.
(I am not a UI designer.)
Attachment 208496, "Making the window extra-tall is revealing.":
Version: 3.2.x