On 10/29/07, Joshua A. Andler <joshua@...533...> wrote:
Easy remedy provided someone wants to spend the time doing it... and maintaining things too. People tend to want to make changes and not maintain them, which then means the other devs get pulled away from more important issues.
Just wanted to add that replacing all of our icons is a huge amount of work. It's been worked on for many years now. I don't think anything comparable can be done in short time. I think outright replacement is simply out of the question: right now you have too few icons anyway, and if you wait until you have all of them in tango, by that time Inkscape will add a lot more :) You're already missing the 3D box tool icon, by the way, which I recently reworked and made much better.
When the UI's are all inherently different to begin with, what good does it do to make the icons match? All three mentioned apps (Inkscape, GIMP, & Scribus) have different ideas of what their UI should be and what makes for good usability.
Agree 100%. Icon unification should be the last stage when the tools, behaviors, modes etc are all made as similar as possible. Otherwise it's just pretending, not real unification of anything. Not to mention that the majority of our users are on Windows and couldn't care less about "unification" with some apps on another platform.
I don't know if bulia would be against it or not. But even if these things could be remedied, the last icon set change was not a notably fantastic or smooth experience. It took a lot of feedback and tweaking to get things to where they are. It was worth the pain in the end, but I don't know that there will be enough flexibility on the tango side to make it worth while for us.
Also agree. In short, I may consider gradual tangofication, but not wholesale change. Both would waste (IMHO) a lot of our time, but in the first case at least there's a hope it will actually improve things overall :)
Re drabness: please consider that Inkscape is a young upstart application, so it's perfectly adequate for it to use bright, memorable icons. This builds recognizability. And now, when it just started to gain wide popularity, it would be the worst time IMHO to change its appearance so drastically and not necessarily for the good. Adobe Illustrator, in its position, may afford very not-in-your-face icons; we may not yet. Besides, AI's icons are much more consistent and eye-pleasing, even though (and maybe because) they are all grayscale, no color at all. This makes a statement. Tango seems to me like it wants to be too many things at once: it is pale but not uniformly pale, and it's colored but not really making good use of the color.
Take paintbucket for example: our icon is very obvious, descriptive, and blends well with the rest. Tango's paintbucket is simply hard to understand - doesn't look very much like a bucket, and what is that blue thing? Especially considering that people don't normally expect to see a paintbucket tool in a vector app.
In short, I'm open to critique of some aspects of our current icons, and for some that I don't care much about I would consider replacing them with tango, but the main toolbar is the face of the program, and I think I like it much better as it is now than what is proposed.