githoot
Icons
Everything is composited at runtime, so assets/ holds one image file and the variants cannot drift
apart. (One more lives there, hoot.mp3: the sound, not an icon, synthesized by
scripts/make-hoot.py.) There used to be a blue owl beside it, for
unread notifications; that feature and its asset were removed in 2.0.0.
The base glyph is an owl, drawn for this project: the thing that sits still and watches so you do not have to. It used to be GitHub’s Invertocat, which is their trademark and not this app’s to wear as an application icon. The glyph carries no state, so replacing it cost nothing but the drawing.
The glyph is dark (
) and carries
no state of its own. On top of it:
| Icon | Mark | Means |
|---|---|---|
 |
red bar | A PR is waiting on your review |
 |
green bar | One of your PRs is approved |
 |
amber bar | Your PR needs work: an objection stands, or it conflicts |
 |
green up-arrow | A newer release is available |
 |
red exclamation | Something needs saying, see below |
 |
small red dot | An outage you acknowledged, see below |
The icons above are the real ones the app draws, not mock-ups.
The three PR bars stack in one column, so there is one place to look rather than three corners, and they fill nearly the whole height — 92 of 96 pixels. Positions are fixed, so a bar always means the same thing and switching one off leaves a gap rather than closing up.
There is deliberately no spare slot. One was reserved for a while for a signal that never arrived, and holding it open cost a quarter of the icon’s height, taken straight out of the bars that do exist. Adding a fourth signal later means re-tuning the geometry, which is the right way round.
Everything combines. All six marks are independent, so any state can be drawn — bars, arrow and exclamation together if that is the truth. The exclamation used to replace the bars, because it sat on top of their column; moving it to the left is what freed the counts to stay visible while something is wrong.
A few real composites:
| Icon | State |
|---|---|
 |
All three PR bars lit |
 |
Counts still visible beside the exclamation |
 |
Every mark at once: three bars, arrow and exclamation |
The arrow sits in the top middle and is drawn last, so it overlaps whatever is beneath it. Each bar’s centre survives that: clip a bar’s end and it still reads as a bar, reach its middle and it stops being one. That is asserted, not hoped for.
The exclamation has three causes, and only the tooltip and menu say which:
| Cause | What the menu offers |
|---|---|
| PR status is not authorized | Authenticate GitHub PR Status |
| A portal reports an incident | An entry naming its mascot, such as The Octocat (GitHub) is having a rough day, check status |
| A poll failed, so a signal is unknown | nothing to click — the tooltip names the axis |
One mark for three causes is a deliberate trade: a second mark would need somewhere to live on an icon that has no free space left. The causes stay separate internally, so an incident never offers a sign-in and a missing credential never points at the status page.
“A poll failed” means exactly that — asked and not answered. A freshly started app has answered nothing yet and shows no mark, and a single transient blip holds the last known value rather than raising one.
Acknowledging an outage
An incident can last hours, and nothing the user does ends it. A mark that cannot be acted on teaches people to ignore the mark, and then they miss the sign-in or the failed poll it also stands for. So opening the status page from the tray menu acknowledges the incident: the user has gone and looked. No entry of its own, so nothing new to find; the cost is that quieting the mark always opens a tab.
| Icon | State |
|---|---|
|
Incident, not yet acknowledged |
 |
The same incident, acknowledged |
The exclamation shrinks to its own dot, in the same corner and the same red. Red because it is still an
outage; small because it has been seen. Grey was tried and lost: at 16px on a light panel it disappears.
The status entry and the tooltip line stay, the line marked (acknowledged), so the truth is one hover
away.
What brings the exclamation back:
- The incident changes. The acknowledgement is keyed on the portal’s own words, which every portal builds from the severity and the parts that are down. Worse, better or another part down all read as new. A repeat of the same verdict does not.
- It ends, and another starts. A recovery forgets the acknowledgement, so the next incident is loud even if it reads the same.
- A restart. It lives in memory only, which errs on the side of saying too much.
- Another cause. It quiets the outage and nothing else: a missing credential or a failed poll during an acknowledged outage still raises the full mark. With several portals, the dot shows only while every portal that is down has been acknowledged.
The mark is therefore a three-state value (state::Mark: none, alert, hushed), and the icon set holds 48
variants rather than 32.