The last time I brought this up it was very late in the Edgy release cycle and there was not much time to stir consciences, but now the time is right to pick this up again.
The issue is: The shredder icon for the delete action has to go, because it has many problems. * It is a very bad drawing of a shredder. People at my office said it looks like a typing machine, or a roll of toilet paper. Only the girl that actually uses the shredder instantly recognized it, but then was fooled as to what was its meaning. It has very low contrast, and bland features, so it is difficult to recognize. The reduced icon is even worse: it looks like a square jellyfish relative of Bob Sponge or however he's called. After all, a shredder is not a machine that has prominent features that can be easily caricaturized. Which also means the following: * It is very difficult to make a very good caricature of a shredder with low detail as in an icon. * The shredder is a very poor metaphor. Many people have never seen a shredder in their lives, or maybe occasionally in movies, so the association of a bad image of a shredder with deletion in their mind is tenuous, at best. I tried my nephews and nieces (ages 7-8-9) and they had not the foggiest notion what it could be (they've never seen a typing machine, which I think is what the icon most closely looks like). They had no problems recognizing a trashcan, though: they've seen them in all sizes and shapes, in reality and movies, and they even have them in their rooms. * People that recognize it as a shredder, get the notion that it means permanent, irreversible deletion, which is not necessarily the truth. The girl in administration in my office, as well as my boyfriend, who routinely destroy documents in a shredder, fell into this trap. They would find it logical to have BOTH a shredder AND a trashcan, side by side, because they understand you can take papers out of a trashcan. But even if it were intuitive, which it is not for a majority of people, usage is inconsistent. Some examples: In Tomboy, the shredder correctly means permanent deletion. Still, switch the icons to the standard Gnome set, and see how much better the page with the red cross works. In Gedit, however, it stands for plain deletion, the kind that may be undone with ctrl-z or edit-undo. In Evolution it drags a message to the program's trashcan folder, where you can watch it, read it and manipulate it to your heart's content until the trashcan is emptied (THAT might be a good use for the shredder). But then, Evo offers something that looks like a meteorite to symbolize "spam", so their mindset must be clearly different. -- ubuntu-art mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-art
