Feature proposal: Displaying current Units/Changing Units with status bar control.

There's been quite a lot of debate over the default unit of display to use, you can read the conversation here, which was closed. https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/3862

Whatever the side of the debate you're on, wether it should be BTC or mBTC, or other, regular users will probably take too long to find a way to change the current unit of display, and if the unit of display were ever changed to something other than BTC, the current transaction tables"Amount" column don't mention anywhere what Unit of Display is being used.

So last night I started playing with the idea of having a status bar component that would: 1. Show you what is the current unit of display at all times. 2. Let you change the unit of display easily.

Here's how it looks (see attachment), just wanted to get feedback, if this is something you also consider valuable in terms of user experience, or maybe you don't want to allow any more controls on the status bar (because then people will want to add more and more)

Just want to get some feedback before I continue working on this to polish it and submit a pull request.

Cheers. Angel (@gubatron)

Hello Angel,

Good initiative. This looks good. If I understand, the dropdown menu is for the whole application, so it make sense to have it in a common part of the layout.

A slight optimisation would be to write the unit in the transaction table header too (since we read from top to bottom). This would give something like "Amount (mBTC)". That way, the user doesn't have to think twice about the unit of his values.

Hope it helps,

On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 6:39 PM, Angel Leon <gubatron@gmail•com> wrote:

> There's been quite a lot of debate over the default unit of display to
> use, you can read the conversation here, which was closed.
> https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/3862
>
> Whatever the side of the debate you're on, wether it should be BTC or
> mBTC, or other, regular users will probably take too long to find a way to
> change the current unit of display, and if the unit of display were ever
> changed to something other than BTC, the current transaction tables"Amount"
> column don't mention anywhere what Unit of Display is being used.
>
> So last night I started playing with the idea of having a status bar
> component that would:
> 1. Show you what is the current unit of display at all times.
> 2. Let you change the unit of display easily.
>
> Here's how it looks (see attachment), just wanted to get feedback, if this
> is something you also consider valuable in terms of user experience, or
> maybe you don't want to allow any more controls on the status bar (because
> then people will want to add more and more)
>
> Just want to get some feedback before I continue working on this to polish
> it and submit a pull request.
>
>
> Cheers.
> Angel (@gubatron)
>
>
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On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 6:39 PM, Angel Leon <gubatron@gmail•com> wrote:

>
> Here's how it looks (see attachment), just wanted to get feedback, if this
> is something you also consider valuable in terms of user experience, or
> maybe you don't want to allow any more controls on the status bar (because
> then people will want to add more and more)

Looks good to me.

Though we already allow specifying a unit in all places where the user can specify a BTC amount.

We also already show the unit in all places where amounts are shown, except the tables, would be good to add a [unit] in the header there as well, see https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/3970 .

If that is done, I'm not sure how much a global setting in the status bar would add. It may make it more apparent to the user that multiple units can be selected.

Wladimir

On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 12:39 AM, Wladimir <laanwj@gmail•com> wrote:

> If that is done, I'm not sure how much a global setting in the status
> bar would add. It may make it more apparent to the user that multiple
> units can be selected.

If thats done it should be done in a way in which it's impossible that a stray keypress could switch it or someone may eventually have a very very bad day.

With this I'll continue then to work on this with the addition of: - Showing the current unit on the header column title "Amount ($unitHere)" - Will make sure the user cannot change the current unit of display by mistake by adding a confirmation dialog.

Thanks all for the feedback! Angel.

http://twitter.com/gubatron

On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 3:54 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail•com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 12:39 AM, Wladimir <laanwj@gmail•com> wrote:
> > If that is done, I'm not sure how much a global setting in the status
> > bar would add. It may make it more apparent to the user that multiple
> > units can be selected.
>
> If thats done it should be done in a way in which it's impossible that
> a stray keypress could switch it or someone may eventually have a very
> very bad day.
>