Kill ? icons

Loïc Marteau loic.marteau at gmail.com
Mon Dec 29 04:46:56 GMT 2008


Hello !

I would like to try to avoid a maximum the user be confused by a "?"
icon that we can get sometimes when :
- there is not artwork made for the desired mimetype for the file he
want to browse (exemple : .srt files)
- there is no icon setted in a dialog windows
- there is no icon setted in a notification plasmoid

Here is a patch to add an icon in the confirmation dialog that the
user get when he try to activate Kwin composition in Desktop settings.
I think this dialog is a good example.
The question i'm asking myself in term of usability is :
Can this specific "?" icon lead the user to be confused ?
Kde ask the user if all is fine after the composition's activaton and
he will seeing this disgraceful "?" icon at a moment he's waiting for
seeing some candy eyes coming. Perhaps he will not understand what it
is really for (something wrong or buggy elsewhere) ?
Dont know if it is just a forget or if the idea was to just put an "?"
icon to let the user know that he has to answer something !? I dont
think this can be relevant because usually in dialogs that ask user
for some interaction there is some big warning icon inside the dialog
windows itself. And using exactly the same icon that is used to the
file mimetype that dont have artwork seems a bit broken too.

1- Is it ok to commit this patch ?

2- However I'm not sure there is a lot of dialog windows without
proper icon, so perhaps we can stay as this and write some patch when
we found one ? If not we can perhaps deprecate the actual dialog
constructor and create a new one to force the developer to specify an
proper icon each time he create a dialog ?

3- David recently add a patch to replace in the browser file
management a white icon instead the "?" one when the file has no known
mimetype, but perhaps we can extend that for the icon that have a
known mimetype but dont have artwork yet.

4- For the notification plasmoid that dont have icon setted when the
user copy or move a file I dont know where to search to resolve the
problem
4bis- Sometimes this notifications are not really relevant when the
user is directly responsible of the action and the action take no time
(creation/move of file in the same partition, copy of a small file,
click on a http link in some application to open the browser
window/gwenview etc). Sorry if this is off topic


Cheers

Lo
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: kwincompositingicon.patch
Type: text/x-patch
Size: 589 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-core-devel/attachments/20081229/645739ec/attachment.bin>


More information about the kde-core-devel mailing list