Secure Note as Favorite; Firefox Helper icon colour

Kriegie

Hi all.
First post. Started testing 1P a week ago on my Win7 PC with Firefox and things are looking pretty good. Planning to order soon.
I've an initial couple of questions...

When I mark a Secure Note as a Favorite, the star is highlighted as if all's well, but the item doesn't appear in the Favorites list when I click on the Helper icon and nor does Secure Notes appear in the Helper icon drop-down list together with Logins, Credit Cards and Identities.
Is this normal behaviour, a bug or am I doing something wrong?

Have you ever thought of brightening up the Helper icon with a touch of colour? I must say that it looks uninterestingly drab & lifeless right now. I reckon the icon would be greatly improved by displaying its outer ring in red when 1P is locked and in blue when unlocked.

Kriegie

To avoid any confusion, by "Helper icon" I mean the 1Password button in the Firefox tool bar

RichardPayne

When I mark a Secure Note as a Favorite, the star is highlighted as if all's well, but the item doesn't appear in the Favorites list when I click on the Helper icon and nor does Secure Notes appear in the Helper icon drop-down list together with Logins, Credit Cards and Identities. Is this normal behaviour, a bug or am I doing something wrong?

This is normal behaviour. The extension menu only shows item that can be used in the browser. ie: logins, credit cards and identities. Since secure notes have no use in the browser they are not displayed.

Have you ever thought of brightening up the Helper icon with a touch of colour? I must say that it looks uninterestingly drab & lifeless right now. I reckon the icon would be greatly improved by displaying its outer ring in red when 1P is locked and in blue when unlocked.

It seems to be the general style these days to go for flat monochrome icons. Colour and 3D is so 2000. ;)
I think the principle is that icons are generally not the thing that interests you when using software. The thing you want to focus on and engage with is the content; a web page in a browser, a picture in a picture viewer for example. The idea is, why distract the user with bright colourful icons when most of the time they're not looking at them. Keep the content bright, colourful and interesting and keep the UI toned down and in the background.

Kriegie

Re Secure Note as Favorite, thanks for the info & justification. Made me hunt for the purpose behind Favorites in non-browser functions and found it, hence I've now enabled View > Favorites in the 1P main window that serves my purpose well.

As for monotone -oops- monochrome icons, it's obviously a matter of taste and I remain pro a touch of colour as does NoScript.

DBrown

Thanks for the follow-up, @Kriegie‌. @RichardPayne's reply is, as usual, spot on. :)

svondutch

Have you ever thought of brightening up the Helper icon with a touch of colour? I must say that it looks uninterestingly drab & lifeless right now.

We're trying to be consistent with the other Windows 7 (and Windows 8) icons...

Guess what? Dropbox recently followed our lead :)

Kriegie

I was referring to the 1P extension icon in Firefox:

And although I can see that here you've followed Mozilla's convention, there's no reason why that rather significant 1P icon shouldn't be different and informative as is the range of NoScript icons. In the 1P case it would be improved by the icon ring turning say red (for locked) or say blue (for unlocked), but as I've already said, I recognise that it's a matter of taste.

RichardPayne

Personally, I'd be in favour of coloured ring when you hover over the icon (red for lock, green/blue for unlocked). Moving the pointer to the icon indicates a shift in focus from the browser content to the toolbar and so a dash of colour would be appropriate.

DBrown

It's an interesting idea, @RichardPayne‌, but none of the other browser toolbar buttons behave that way, at least in a quick check just now of IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera in Windows 8.1.

danvpeterson

Great idea and it's something we have definitely considered. Not necessarily coloring it but doing something to indicate locked/unlocked status. Basically it's just something that I haven't found the time to dedicate to yet. There are a couple problems I see with using color. 1) I'd like it to be consistent across the browser and menu bar style icons. 2) To me showing it in red would indicate a problem (we show red when you type the wrong master password for instance) and I worry that it would confuse a lot of users.

Thanks for the feedback and I will very much keep it in mind.

DBrown

I agree with @danvpeterson‌ on both points, which are reinforced by the absence of such "color-changing" behavior with any of the other toolbar icons in the supported browsers.

RichardPayne

1) not really sure why that's a problem. You can do exactly the same thing in both places.

2) fair enough. I'm not hung up on particular colours.

Kriegie

@DBrown, you say such "color-changing" behavior is absent from any of the other toolbar icons in supported browsers, but that isn't correct - the NoScript icon image (see Post #7) changes in form and colour with status.

RichardPayne

@Kriegie I think @DBrown is talking about the standard built-in icons. 3rd party extensions are free to do whatever they like, but ideally they should try to follow the prevailing style.

DBrown

Yes, I was referring to the icons in my installations of the supported browsers. There are at least hundreds of extensions that I don't have installed.

Sorry that wasn't clearer, @Kriegie‌.