icons in HEAD CVS

[Scott Wheeler]

On Sunday 28 July 2002 10:47, Malte Starostik wrote:
> Agreed. I do like crystal but I'm not sure whether it's really good to 
> completely change the icons' look in a minor version. Especially since the 
> theme is installed in a way that makes the normal hicolor icons unavailable. 
> Suggestion: install crystal as a real icon theme in addition to hicolor and 
> make it the default theme, still keeping the possibility for users to switch 
> back to hicolor.

A few issues that I've noticed:

*) You can't select HiColor even as an option now.  I presume this will be 
fixed at some point before the release, so I'm not too worried about it.

*) We now have SVG icon support.  Do plans exist to move to SVG icons in the 
future?  Will we change the default icon set to SVG icons yet again in the 
next few months?  Two changes of the icon set in the 3.x series seems a bit 
much.

*) The set is incomplete.  

*) The previous problem is rather an annoyance because the old icon style and 
the new are not visually concistant (in terms of color or basic design).

*) There have been some basic changes that affect usability.  I spent a lot of 
time hovering waiting for tooltips yesterday.  There are some rather tricky 
things going on visually.  Rather than updating the "style" of the current 
icons, often the entire look changed, possibly to something that users 
associate with something else.  

One particular example of this that threw me off yesterday was the "download 
email" (tooltip: "check mail") icon.  It went from being something with a 
down arrow, that I associated with downloading to two arrows, one left and 
one right, which I presume is now meant to convey "send and receive".  I know 
the difference is subtle, but I think it's things like that that can confuse 
users (i.e. me).

I tried to compare to WinXP (which one of my roommates has) and one thing that 
I noticed is that it seems that relative to earlier versions, there has been 
some attempt to maintain continuity across the icon themes while updating the 
look.

Going back to my example above, if the Crystal icon was a re-styled down arrow 
and inbox type of thing I would have had no problem, but the current icon 
presents a different concept and requires me to reassociate that concept with 
the given action.

/me wonders if any/most of that made sense.

Cheers,

-Scott

-- 
diff -u life.cpp~ life.cpp
--- life.cpp~   2002/03/19 07:44:28
+++ life.cpp   2002/04/09 15:49:39
-#include <sleep.h>
+#include <caffeine.h>