[Kde-hardware-devel] [kde-artists] Renaming Oxygen's devices/ icons

[Jakob Petsovits]

On Tuesday, 26. June 2007, James Richard Tyrer wrote:
> Jakob Petsovits wrote:
> > It doesn't matter whether it's a thing or not. It's a question of
> > fallbacks, and we'd rather see audio CDs as special form of audio discs
> > than audio CDs as special form of CDs. It provides a better fallback
> > icon.
>
> I should point out that this needs to be done in the way the user thinks
> about it.
>
> IIUC, the icon name is parsed RTL while people speak LTR.
>
> I think that most people think of an 'audio CD' rather than 'CD audio'.
>
> That is, audio is a type of CD -- adjective modifying noun.  Yes, you
> could also say that CD was a type of audio, but is that really the way
> users think about it?

The way users think is less important here than what users get to see when a 
specialized icon is not available in a theme. But it seems there won't be 
media-optical-audio-cd and similar icons anyways, so let's just drop that 
point and have a look at the more important other issue:

> > Also, this thread came to the conclusion that for the user, knowing the
> > concrete disc format matters less than knowing what's on the disc.
>
> Yes, that makes some sense.  But, are users really going to be able to
> tell that from the icon?  Wouldn't it be better to use a badge to
> indicate that it was an audio disk or a video disk?

A badge, like one from the "emblems" folder?
Actually, I like that idea a lot. Overlaying a (for example) media-optical-dvd 
icon with an emblem-video icon would have a few important benefits:

- Makes it possible to indicate both disc type and disc content without
  having x^y icons for all of them,
- Eliminates the difficult choice between the type and content name prefixes,
  and their order, and
- Enables us to do the same thing that the Gnomies do, without needing to
  start a discussion where it would be seriously hard to convince the
  specification maintainers, as the existence of media-optical-{audio,video}
  is also predefining how the user interface should look like.

So, +1 for having media-optical, media-optical-dvd, media-optical-hddvd etc. 
PLUS emblem-audio and emblem-video. Kévin, what do you think about this?

media-optical-recordable can't reasonably be represented with an emblem,
so I think it should still be kept as is.