On Tue, 2006-08-01 at 14:28 -0400, Pat Suwalski wrote: > Jakub Steiner wrote: > > An image thumbnail will give you much more information than a text label > > on a tiny icon and that is likely to be the default case on the GNOME > > desktop. > > Unless, like me, you're always converting images that are large and you > don't want to thumbnail, but you want to quickly distinguish between the > TIFF and the JPEG. This leads in to the further discussion.
Hi Pat, For me good design is about finding what's essential and then worry about the special cases. In this specific example I mean worry about having a complete icon theme that provides a core set of images. Yes to a hacker it is crucial to tell a generic text file from a patch. To an artist or photographer it's essential to tell a raw image file from a jpeg. To a musician it's essential to tell a non-lossy flac file from an mp3. I am not saying we shouldn't provide that distinction at all. But I reckon it makes sense to first worry about this small, basic, maintainable and themeable set first, and then provide icons for specific use cases. Similarly to what I mentioned with the generic vs specific device icons in my previous mail, it's a less of an evil to have the user look at a file extension for distinction than have the old application-x-bittorrent show up in Bluecurve (Now I'm pretty sure David will tell me they already have that covered too ;). The benefit of having minimal base icon set is that distributions only need to worry about this much stuff to theme without shipping a Frankenstein. Yes it will be a bonus if they ship a specific device icons and specific filetype icons. But in case they don't manage to hire an army of talented artists, they will have a consistent looking set with just a few icons (still a fair bit of work ;). I don't know how much time exactly went into gnome icon theme over the years, but I do feel like we failed to provide a good icon theming platform for distributions. Back then we had old Gnome 1.0 styled icons inconsistency. Then I tried to create an icon for every single random mimetype people requested. Yes we had all the various CD media icons. But there's less artists than there are free software hackers, and there isn't too many of those either. Ad-hoc naming, missing sizes and thus blurry icons for small sizes and a general mess was the result. So yea, a specific tiff icon would be nice, but does it have to come now? Does it have to be in the core icon theme? Before we make sure all icons are named properly, have all the sizes provided, include the artwork "source" I don't think we should worry about those yet. I'm talking about the filetypes now, I'm going a bit soft on the device icons now.. :) -- Jakub Steiner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
