new working set icons... not unique?

[Sven Brauch]

Hi!

> Just upgraded to 4.6.0 today... the new working set icons are...
> interesting. I'm not quite sure if the color is determined by the on/off
> pattern (16 icons possible) or orthogonal (81 icons possible?).
The pattern is random.

> However,
> besides that upgrading destroys any previous memory associations, the
> new icons don't feel nearly as mnemonic; it feels much harder to
> remember that a particular set is associated with "the blue rising
> (left-to-right) diagonal pattern" than the old icons which were e.g.
> "world", "alarm", "portrait", and so forth.
Ok, I see your issue. However previously, there were lots of
complaints like "why is there an alarm clock icon in my IDE" and a lot
of people were confused why there were random icons representing
completely unrelated things used for the buttons. And I agree with
them, it was really weird at places.
That's why we decided to introduce a new, neutral set of icons.

> (Especially as one could
> creatively 'add all' to get a particular icon to be associated with a
> particular working set such that there is some logical association
> between the set and the icon, e.g. "improving the testing framework"
> with "alarm".)
Well, that was never meant to work like this and reminds me of
http://xkcd.com/1172/ a bit ;)
We could have a "new random icon" button to allow picking new icons
when you get one you find particularily hard to remember, if that
would help you.

> Worse, however, in one of my sessions I have the same icon twice but for
> different working sets!
This is a valid complaint. It is indeed possible that icons which are
very similar to each other are generated (if you look closely, you'll
probably find they differ by a bit).
Suggestions on how to improve this are welcome.
Would a "generate new icon" button help here, too maybe?

Greetings,
Sven