Giving up our applications' identity? (was: Re: KDE)

[Jakob Petsovits]

On Tuesday, 15. January 2008, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Monday 14 January 2008, person-maintainer wrote:
> > On Thursday 27 December 2007, Jakob Petsovits wrote:
> > > SVN commit 753390 by jpetso:
> > >
> > > Icon renaming (code changes - KDE/):
> > > kmail -> internet-mail
> >
> > Please excuse my ignorance, but are we now completely giving up our
> > identity by using totally generic icons for all of our apps? Should
>
> no, we shouldn't be. i think this particular change is actually in error
> and needs to be reverted.

I might agree to that (and would admit having pushed stuff too far in some 
places), but nonetheless there was a reasoning for this - the idea is that 
common base applications without the need for a separate brand (calculator, 
basic text editor, audio mixer) get generic icons.

My assumption here was that KMail is mostly used as part of Kontact and 
therefore doesn't need to be specifically branded (same reasoning for 
KOrganizer and KAddressBook, btw) so I assigned it the generic icon.
It's certainly not a deterministic question on how to draw the line here,
and I'd also be fine with KMail going back to a branded kmail icon.

> internet-mail should only be used by other applications which are refering
> internally to a mail action.

No, that's mostly actions/mail-message-new or maybe actions/mail-send.
internet-mail is an application icon and should not be used for actions.
(Using it as generic "open the mail client" icon or as icon for a config page 
should be ok, though.)

Hope I didn't intimidate too many people with that icon crap in KDE 4 :-P

Love,
  Jakob