[dot] HIG Hunting Season: Icons

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1181568514/

From: Olaf Schmidt <ojschmidt at kde.org>
Dept: we-all-need-oxygen
Date: Monday 11/Jun/2007, @06:28

HIG Hunting Season: Icons
=========================

   The great work of the Oxygen icon artists is a much discussed and
anticipated part of KDE 4. The new icons now follow the freedesktop.org
naming specification
[http://standards.freedesktop.org/icon-naming-spec/icon-naming-spec-latest.html]
which makes it easier to share icons between applications of several
desktop environments. In the HIG hunt this week, we will check that this
work lives up to its full potential by looking for missing icons and
wrong uses. Read on for more details.

     The most important part of the checklist is searching for misused
or missing icons, both in the default icon theme Oxygen, and in the
Monochrome icon theme needed for accessibility. A second topic is
checking for use of the KDE system settings. Most applications will use
the correct setting automatically via the KDE libraries, so this is
mainly about corner case bugs.

     One particular issue of the guidelines has been very controversial
in the past (defaulting to an application-specific icon theme in
Amarok). The HIG team is not interested in starting any flamewars, so
please skip this issue when doing these checks. The checklists are meant
as guidance for developers, not as laws.
 Reporting Procedure
     The procedure for reviewers is pretty simple:

 You pick an application which is included in KDE 4 Alpha, but not yet
reviewed by another person. See this wiki page
[http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=hig_hunting_season] for
reference. You open a checklist and go through the checklist items. For
each infringement you find, post a bug. In the title, write "HIG" and
the number of the checklist item which is not met (e.g. CL4/1.4). To
test for the existence of monochrome icons, make sure that the
monochrome icons from the kde-accessibility module are installed. Select
the icon theme in KControl, then restart KDE to ensure that all
applications are aware of the new setting. On the wiki page of the
checklist, add a section for the application you reviewed and link all
bug reports you have created.  Happy hunting!