icons in HEAD CVS

[Torsten Rahn]

> Altghough I like some of the new icons, I do not understand, 
> why they can't be in a separate icon-theme and when it's ready,
> it can be made the default 

Do you believe that KDE 2.0 would have ever been released if we 
would have said: "We stick with KDE 1.x as HEAD and we let people 
develop KDE 2 somewhere else. And it will only replace KDE 1.x if
it will be at least as complete as KDE 1.x was without any regressions"?

Do you think that people would have felt encouraged to work and fix on a
dead branch any further? 

> Especially since the theme is installed in a way that makes the 
> normal hicolor icons unavailable. 

You do get the idea of the term "development branch" don't you? Did I 
state anywhere that the current state is meant to stay like that?

In case some people missed it: We are still working on this icon set. It's not
meant to be finished in any way.

Of course we appreciate any criticism but this should be done on kde-artists in
the first place.

> I think the "Show desktop" icon should be redone/rethought. At the 
> first moment I thought it's a new kwrite icon.

This is indeed an issue that needs to be fixed. Same goes for the lack of
contrast which was an issue that was known to me already.

> *) 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 current icons are already rendered from SVG-versions. It's just that this
doesn't happen automatically yet. 
The concept will work like this: We have a set of prerendered 16x16, 32x32,
48x48 icons which are optimized by hand to achieve best contrast/sharpness
recognizability. For all sizes larger than that there will be SVG icons.

> *) The set is incomplete.

As is KDE 3.1. HiColor is far away from complete, too btw.

> *) 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).

Of course we plan to have a complete crystal for KDE 3.1.

> *) There have been some basic changes that affect usability.

True. And there are even some which are quite nasty as you mentioned.

> which I presume is now meant to convey "send and receive". 

AFAIK this is what the button in KMail behaves now, doesn't it?

> I think switching icon-theme within a major version is not very nice 
> for third party applications because all those applications will 
> suddenly look out of place if they still have old-style icons.

I agree with you. 
Unfortunately we didn't have the resources in terms of man power to 
create a new icon theme for KDE 3.0. And nobody knows if by KDE 4.0 
we will have two fulltime artists again who could spend their time on 
something like this. So it might just be better to make use of the current
chance. 

Tackat



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