Review Request 110107: Remove the random icons from working sets

[Sven Brauch]

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http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/110107/#review31386
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Heh, yes, I think so too. I have some more ideas how to make the icons more unique, though.

Several ideas were discussed on IRC about this, and identicons came up too, along with colored n-gons. I dismissed both because they don't seem very realistic for a 16x16 icon. For the n-gons for example, you can use 3, 4, 5 and 6 edges, and then it's over, everything just looks like a circle. I guess if you resize an identicon to 16x16, you'll be left with just a blur, too.

Something I had tried was having a different color for each square, which of course allows for more unique icons, but it also makes them look messy, which in turn harms easy identification again. So, while I agree that the current format is sometimes a bit too indistinguishable, adding too many characteristics to each icon isn't going to help either.
For example in the screenshot of the old version I posted, the icon in the review tab and the icon for the closed set, while quite different, are -- for me -- very difficult to differentiate at first sight too, because I can't grasp an obvious pattern in either of them at this tiny size.

Also, I think the icons should look consistent, i.e. it should be obvious that they describe different instances of the same thing. You could reach that goal too by using basic shapes, but as said, the amount of basic shapes you can draw into 16x16 icons is very limited and quite probably smaller than the amount of different colored-square-patterns the current suggestion allows for. Of course, you could mix both, but that's what I'd rather not do (because people will wonder why half of their sets have stars and triangles and the other half has colored dots).

- Sven Brauch


On April 21, 2013, 10:29 a.m., Sven Brauch wrote:
> 
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> This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
> http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/110107/
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> 
> (Updated April 21, 2013, 10:29 a.m.)
> 
> 
> Review request for KDevelop.
> 
> 
> Description
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> 
> Currently each working set gets a random icon from some application, which looks very weird. For example, it used the alarm function icon, and did lots of things like desaturate it, which in the end made everything look very confusing and messy in my opinion.
> This patch instead replaces the icons by colored dots, inspired by konversation's default nicklist icons. They are easy to differentiate, look clean, and are not associated with totally different things by the user.
> 
> Additionally, the new icons are generated at run-time, and are completely calculated from the working set's ID. Thus, lots of messy code which iterates through possible icons, checks if they're already being used, saves them to a config file, loads them from a config file etc. was removed. Of course this comes at the price of painting the new icons, but the code doing that is contained in one single, obvious function and not splattered around everywhere. Also, the icons are no longer involved in deciding which working sets should be loaded on startup (sic).
> 
> It could be discussed if the icon could still be improved optically, especially I don't like the blue vs. darkgrey contrast too much -- suggestions are welcome!
> 
> 
> Diffs
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> 
>   shell/workingsetcontroller.h 9697a99 
>   shell/workingsetcontroller.cpp 3b4f90c 
>   shell/workingsets/workingset.h ae2aa94 
>   shell/workingsets/workingset.cpp cac0d54 
>   shell/workingsets/workingsettoolbutton.cpp c890049 
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> Diff: http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/110107/diff/
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> 
> Testing
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> Manually tested creating and removing working sets in various conditions, and also tested closing and re-opening kdevelop with various working set setups. Seems okay.
> 
> 
> File Attachments
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> old workingset icons
>   http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/media/uploaded/files/2013/04/20/workingsets.png
> new workingset icons
>   http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/media/uploaded/files/2013/04/20/workingsets_new.png
> 
>   http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/media/uploaded/files/2013/04/21/workingsets_dark.png
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Sven Brauch
> 
>

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