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

[Kenneth Wimer]

On Tuesday 15 January 2008 10:38:42 Brad Hards wrote:
> On Tuesday 15 January 2008 01:54:09 pm Jakob Petsovits wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Why? What happens when I have two (or three, or four) calculators? I see
> this type of rebranding / generic branding as a distro function.

honestly, what is the difference in the needed visual metaphor? a calculator 
is a calculator is a calculator, there may be small differences in the UI but 
for such a simple tool like this I see no reason to spend the time making 
different icons for kcalc, gcalc, ecalc, what-ever-calc, etc. again, how 
would one show the difference so that it is understandable to somebody who is 
not a big-time fan of the particular calulator version? 

I can see the point that some applications are important enough to warrant 
having their own icons - at this time many of the icons are not finished - 
but for many/most of the simple tools in a system there is no need to make 
different icons.

> > Hope I didn't intimidate too many people with that icon crap in KDE 4 :-P
>
> I think you annoyed them.
>
> If you want to screw around with icons, perhaps fixing things that don't
> have icons would be better than rebranding existing stuff? See
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SebastianVahl/KDE4MissingIcons

Gosh, what a great way to get your point across! I am sure that now that you 
have called our work "screwing around" we are going to fire up our graphics 
programs and get to work making 5 different calculator icons, 9 text editors, 
etc.

sorry but it is mainly a waste of time and at the size that the icons are 
shown in the menu you will never be able to tell the difference anyway.

--
Ken