New wifi icon

Development OS
#1

Hey, I wanted to make a new Icon for the wifi signal strength. The current one is, in my opinion extremely hard to read, especially in a dark enviroment.

I am not that good with Icon-O-Matic however, so I wanted to share what i came up with. perhaps someone can improve upon it or give me tips!
low strength half strength full strength

Variants for a captive portal:
low strength captive half strength captive full strength captive

One Idea I’ve also had is to add the type of security as icon into it, any thoughts on that?
(i.e red X for no security, green V for OWE, lock for wpa2/wpa3 and lock with note for wpa2/3 enterprise?)

I literally can’t upload the source file to the forum because it’s not “authorized”, why exactly does the forum require file extensions…?

11 Likes
#2

You’re right, it is very hard to see.
I like your suggestions.

#3

I should boot my native install that supports wifi to actually see it :slight_smile:

#4

WPA2/WPA3 is not as secure as enterprise, i think. I’d say leave off the lock in that case.

#5

I’m not sure introducing colour for those icons in the menu is a good idea. Unlike the traffic light scheme of the NetworkStatus icon, it’s not apparent what the different colours mean. Secondly, the used colours may clash with costum system colours.

Even now, the signal strength icons don’t respect them: they should appear with the “Select menu item text” colour.

The signal strength icons would be easier to see as is, if they always used darker colours. Currently, they are “ghosted” when their wifi menu item isn’t under the mouse pointer. Here, the mouse-over makes no sense IMO.

ETA: These icons are tiny. I don’t think additional details like a lock will be a good idea.

#6

Huh? WPA2 Enterprise is WPA2 and WPA3 enterprise is WPA3… the only difference is that the enterprise variant requires a username aswell…

#7

Green is good orange is “somethibg wrong”, seems pretty obvious to me.
The current non-colored variabts are really hard to see, and they are too detailed with 5 bars and such.

Haikus icons are easy to read because if the colors :slight_smile:

#8

Why equal “captive portals” something wrong?
Haiku’s icons are best admired at a decent size. In a menu item, they are really small. As I wrote, removing the ghosting would probably make the existing symbols easier do decipher already.
Not sure three signal strength degrees are enough. Most networks might fall in the middle category…

#9

Further user action is required, you won’t get an internet connection in that situation yet.

As for menu item size I don’t see the problem, deskbar does exactly that and it works fine, that is indeed the majority of icons I see.

What’s wrong with the middle category?

#10

The signal icon helps to find the strongest wifi. If all are in the middle category, it doesn’t help.

#11

This has been my experience with wifi on haiku though, almost all are in the middle category, only outliers are in the weak or strong signal category. I would put all the ones with good to excelent with two bars, the acceptable ones with one bar and the bad ones with just the dot. This seems to match roughly with how the UI works already.

edit: add to that that this would be one Icon per SSID where currently we have severall icons for each, so grouping them would sinplify this a bit regardless