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

[Jakob Petsovits]

On Tuesday, 15. January 2008, Brad Hards wrote:
> On Tuesday 15 January 2008 01:54:09 pm Jakob Petsovits wrote:
> > 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?

Well, yeah. Point is,

a)
I might be able to draw icons, but not as good as Oxygen should look.
So count me out for meaningful icon creation work.

b)
4.0 was the only release where we could actually get rid of stuff. There was 
(and is) an endless amount of icons in kdelibs/kdebase, many of those were 
(and are) being misused by developers looking at the concerned icon in 
Crystal/Oxygen and thinking "looks cute, I'll take that one".

Unfortunately KDE has often been using same icons for different use cases, and 
that impedes the possibilities of themers as they must draw icons based on 
the original looks than on what the icon should represent.
The renaming effort was also a push for less complexity on the artist side.

c)
Standardizing on icon names is a good thing! Imagine a world where you don't 
search for and download "KDE icon themes", but just for "icon themes", and 
those work nicely in all desktops, or at least in the major two. Or if you 
want to draw a set yourself and don't need to make at least two copies of 
each of the icons, which basically makes an icon set an unmaintainable mess.

Yes, I did break stuff. No, icons are still not perfectly named in places or 
even complete. But hell yeah, it was very well worth the effort.

I should have put my blog on Planet KDE and make some publicity really.
Maybe I'll get to that when writing icon howtos for TechBase.

Cheers,
  Jakob