FireStatus - Great But WTF?

FireStatus for those who don't know, is a Firefox addon which lets you post to both Twitter and Identi.ca among others at the same time. It sits as a tiny icon in your status bar of Firefox until you need it. A click on the icon opens up the little window across the bottom of the status bar so you can type your message, with easy check boxes for where to send to, as well as including URLs etc.

So far so good right? Well, yes but here's where I can only ask WTF were they thinking. It works great to send messages but look where they chose to put the pop up notifications if you set FireStatus to receive. Who decided it'd be a great idea to put the notifications OVER the status bar? They slide up from the bottom of the screen, one at a time COVERING everything below them.

If you compare how much I have on my status bar, how much of my browsers functionality is along there, now look at what you can just make out with my short message for this post. Yep, from all that, you can just make out the ScribeFire icon; the very last one on the list which sits about half way along the screen. The length of the notification pop up varies with the length of the message. A full 140 character message could easily go almost full screen, depending on the size and resolution of your monitor. The result of this is that you have to time clicking on any of these icons like a video game, where the tide is low and the icon is exposed again before a new notification swoops up to cover it. That's not the best part of this usability masterpiece, the best part is that you can't set them to appear anywhere else. Even if the notifications came in horizontally, slightly above the status bar it'd be fine.

FireStatus is a great addon for sending, but it's completely impractical for receiving. This means you have to use something else to receive, which in turn leads back to why install two addons which do the same thing? You may notice I also have TwitterFox installed. No prizes for guessing why. I also installed IdentiFox after taking the screenshot.