Fast context identification

[dfleury]

Is a often situation: I spent some precious seconds figuring out which context I'm currently using by analyzing the activated extensions and apps. Sound a trivial task, however, most of the extensions I use has no icon on the bar (Extension example). This scenario makes the context understanding harder.

After some time writing this message, I figured out that the current context has a green bar on left side of popup chooser, but I'm using Context for months! So this feature may be so implicit that, turns this subtle information in something meaningless even for a frequent user.

Here is a list of bad solutions I have imagined:

• change the icon: It may be confusing because if the Context icon vary, the user lose a visual reference to access the popup
• current context icon inside Context puzzle icon: I have my doubts if there is enough space inside the puzzle icon to mask the current context icon decently
• use the first letter of context name: The user may have more than one context with the same first letter

So my best possible solution until now to solve this problem is:
I could assign a color to a context in options page. With this, every time I change the context, the gray puzzle icon now assume the chosen color of the selected context or none if no one was chosen

Is there something more to add on this issue?

[kdzwinel]

Hey Diego! Thanks for extensive description!

Couple of people mentioned it in the past and we finally came up with colors on the context buttons (green/yellow). Why we haven't decided to go with something more prominent? Well, the issue is, that contexts, besides on/off state (indicated by green or no color), also have an intermediate state where some of their extensions are on and some are off (indicated by yellow color). We could have been strict and assume that context is only on if all of, and ONLY, it's extensions are enabled. However, people tend to use + and - buttons on contexts mixing them together. Also, the arrow button allows more granular control (enabling/disabling individual extensions) and this is also something that people use a lot. So, colors seemed like a great idea, but I agree that this may be too subtle.