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

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Wednesday 16 January 2008, Jakob Petsovits wrote:
> On Wednesday, 16. January 2008, Tom Albers wrote:
> > Yes, *you* would. But helping people on irc for example would
> > include finding out which of the applications is used in kontact.
> > And I expect even more mailclients now that Akonadi is here.

That's a rather weak argument. Do you want to ask people on irc whether 
there's an icon resembling an orange E in the side bar? Well, I would 
just ask them to open the About dialog and tell me the exact version of 
the mail part. AFAIK, all icons can be replaced by icon schemes so you 
cannot make any assumptions about the look of the icons. OTOH, the text 
in the About dialog does only depend on the translation and the 
important parts of the text won't be translated.


> > I think it is very important to keep your identity/brand in the
> > sidebar and everywhere.  I just think it's wrong that every
> > calculator has the same icon. I'm not saying that you should make
> > them all, just don't change them to a generic one. In the start
> > menu, I recognise the application mostly by the icon - and I do
> > care which calculator is started ;-). Just mho. But as I don't
> > interfere with artists' work, I will leave it to you.
>
> I have no intention of offending application maintainers, and if you
> want to keep Mailody branded in all places then this is how it will
> be done. I'm not claiming my opinion to be the ultimate truth, just
> wanted to give input.
>
> My personal opinion is that the default sidebar (KMail, KOrganizer,
> KAddressBook) should not be branded, because I don't see why new
> users need to see a big "E" for their mail view. That's focusing on
> the technical basis instead of how users see it.

Exactly my thoughts. I don't care how Mailody looks if integrated into 
Kontact, but the KMail-based mail component should be represented by 
the generic icon for the mail component.


Regards,
Ingo
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