Here are a few practical examples. Figure 3 Suppose one of the above-mentioned FTP transfers begins to stall. One of the beacons begins to glow red and stays red for several minutes. Simply pop the window back open, kill or restart the transfer. The instant you kill that process, the other four beacons begin to glow more brightly, since you have just improved the speed of the other four by freeing up some bandwidth.
Beacons make the task of babysitting multiple applications a breeze.
There is no longer any need to continually pop the application back open to see what is going on. From there, it would also be wise to allow the applications, if permitted by the user, to dictate their own behavior sets. Ultimately, the user must have total and complete freedom to dictate the appearance and behavior of color-reactive elements on his or her desktop. There are two ways to go about changing the appearance of a lamp or beacon on the desktop. With InSight, the plan was simply to change the icon on the fly by loading the appropriately-colored icon in its place.