For whatever my opinion is worth, you have gradients down, and probably have since before 9.5.
Therefore, why the heck you have not considered them baffles me a little.
A meter is a meter is a meter...
Progressive and accurate noticeability which seems obvious to me that you are attempting to achieve, not only looks better as the color changes gradually representing increases or decreases, also while testing placements and correct layout for me tells me when I have got it right or messed it up far easier.
Speaking like Nexter, sorry if you think that's a good gradient, it's not even close to a good gradient. I know you can do a LOT better.
Just a suggestion, take it or leave it.

The blue/orange version works best in my never humble opinion. It makes it far more clear what is what, at a mere glance. And of course, the growth of occupied space has to start at 0 degrees. Ideally, you could have both used and free space percentage but there isn't enough space for that in the icon. So, used space should be fine - 95pc used simply tells me that 5pc are free. Surely.

Phew, yes, why keep it simple when you can make it complicated. Yes, a gradient could be used, say going from light orange to deep red for Used Space. *But* this is not as simple as dropping a couple of bitmaps into a theme - e.g., for the UPS/Battery module I use a simple bar graph, with the progress bar being a gradient. Dead simple. (And incidentally, progressing right to left.) How easily or not it is doable will remain to be seen. Especially also complicated further by the colourisation options.

BOOM !
No you are not wrong. I won't speak for everyone because nobody can, but what I see all over the Internet when people say what they like, it is consistently how much they have left. They can work out easily what they have used by what they do or do not have left.

RE: Colorisation - it's not about aesthetics remotely. Colour coding only. Watching it change colour I am confident a lot of people easily identify just looking before they even look at the numbers.

P.S - there is always an option to keep everyone happy that Jorge could let the user see what they want - how much left or how much used.

**BOOM**! You've mixed a quote from Jorge - 1st sentence - with a quote from me - 2nd sentence.

I freely admit that my quote editing TRULY SUCKS.
- because of this, I am claiming a senior moment.

Not normally allowed for sub-septuagenarians, but OK, I'll accept. Happens to the best of us.

some days getting out of bed I feel like a Centenarian.

back to topic

My 'twopenneth':

With the original 'deep pie' it was obvious which was the used and free portions, but I have to agree that as the icons get smaller and additional text is added then they do become messy.

I prefer the slight 3D representation with orange usage bar starting at the top of the hoop, and running clockwise - this approach just seems more natural to me. Maybe allow the user to choose the colours to represent 'Used' and 'Free' so that it is more obvious to them.

The other representation looks more like the Windows Drive Properties approach, although in their case they have a key for the colour usage.

I think that it would be useful to include the drive size in the representation (26% of what), either above or as part of the current lower display - this could be configured to be optional.

Except it wasn't that obvious, and in the first place it wasn't any kind of proper pie representation, it was all wrong.

However, partly agreed on the drive capacity. At least, yes, it would be useful to have an indication of the actual size, but as per @techlobo's images above, "2TB (26%)" could be rather confusing and be interpreted as 2TB = 26% used instead of 26% *of* 2TB. It needs to be made clear that the drive capacity is meant. Perhaps the central drive letter could be reduced a little and then permit having "size" in brackets below it?

That goes without saying.

As I wrote in a previous post, I am using the same dialog used for customizing the colors of the Nexus dock control icon. The Nexus icon is composed of two separate bitmaps, background and text, which can be colorized individually and are then combined together.

The pie chart style also uses two separate bitmaps (one used space, another free space) which are then also combined together and can thus be colorized individually.

Below you can see the 'Drive' style, which is originally dark, quickly colorized to white using the same method.





I'm not sure about the blue/orange. IMO the contrast looks good when there is more free space than used space, but when it's the opposite I think that much orange is kind of jarring.

I made a version using the baby blue/dark blue colors of the previous style (but with the slight more 3D look) for contrast. I'll put the 3 options here one after the other, let me know which you like best.









Even if I used "17% of 2 TB" or even "17%/2 TB" (as in "17% used of 2 TB) we would have an issue because drives are NEVER actually 2TB, they count TB as units of 1,000 instead of 1,024. As a result, instead of a short round number like "2 TB" you would get something like "1,82 TB" or even "893,31 GB" as is the case for my Intel 905P 960 GB Optane.

So, the text would probably be too long or would have to be shrunk a lot to fit, possibly making it unreadable at low icon sizes.

I still like the blue/orange combination, but it doesn't really matter if the colours are configurable



Agreed that they are never exact sizes, although you could make an approximation. However it is also possible to put the drive size above the icon (as originally mentioned) which enables you to have a bit more granularity.

Nexter I don't think that people will be confused by the %age as presented (even on the earlier images) - I reckon that they will be able to associate the colour as a key for the bar.

@winstep - 'Baby blue' is a ghastly colour at the best of times and on the ring mod it really looks... well, yuck! No, blue/orange wins every time AFAIC. Even when used space is almost full. It's a rude visual/graphic reminder that the user is running short of space on that disk.

@techlobo - I doubt there would be enough space at the top of the icon to accommodate the capacity. And approximation of size would also not be an option. This would then "approximate" all the time, and use a lot of resources unnecessarily. That all is assuming it would even be possible to do, which I doubt.

Errr, yes and no. With the initial pie chart option (shown below) you can get away with it because the whole pie slice is the same color.



But with the orange ring pie chart that isn't true, notice how the inner ring is always dark blue even on the orange slice.

So, if the "base bitmap" is dark blue, changing the color of the base bitmap is also going to change the color of the inner dark blue ring.


If there is text above and below the actual icon becomes too small and loses a lot of the impact, IMO.

Rounding the number is not feasible either as the number then would not match what Windows says the drive size is - worse, a drive advertised as being 12 TB is actually 10.82 TB, round that and you get either 10 or 11 TB.

Anyway, I tried switching the % to used space again and adding the total drive space and it is borderline readable at 48x48 pixel icons (the icon used in the image below is a colorization of the baby blue to dark blue and dark blue to orange, not the final thing yet):



So anyway, the consensus seems to be that the dark blue with the orange ring is better, right?

Also, just wanted to show how the same icon customization panel can also be used to customize the colors of non-composite icons (i.e. single bitmap).

However, I'm thinking that perhaps I should allow the color of the fill bar to be customizable as well (making the drive style module also a composite bitmap):



As you can see I also already settled on the dark blue/orange ring pie chart.

Something else I am working on is getting SMART data drive temperature. I find that info pretty important and Windows itself does not show it.

Getting SMART data requires admin privileges though, so it is something that must be performed by the Winstep Helper Service, not actually the main application.