El vie, 23-01-2009 a las 22:46 +0000, Pajarico escribió:
First we don't know what is the profile of the average Inkscape user so we don't know if he likes tango, if he prefers one shade over differentiated colors, if he uses other apps like Gimp or Scribus (personal opinion: i use Inky and Indesign and Photoshop)... Hell, we don't even know what is the majority operating systems of these users, which brings me the following point: what is "unification"? Keep in mind that not everyone uses Tango icons, not everyone uses gnome, and not everyone uses even Linux! What about users in Windows or MacOS?? This won't bring any unification for them for the most part unless they have Gimp or Scribus (maybe other apps), and not everyone is using them with Inkscape. So what's the deal?
Well, of course it doesn't make much sense if you think about inkscape as an isolated application, but Inkscape is the flagship vector illustration program in free software, and it since we'll possibly never have a "Creative Suite" in the free software world the idea of a good integration between the main applications makes a lot of sense. One of the strengths of Adobe CS is that every application in the suite is integrated seamlessly (or at least that's what they'd want). Free software packages can't do that but at least an effort to unify criteria would benefit a good workflow between application for people who can't afford a proprietary design suite. You don't seem to care about the fact that Inkscape is free software and there are people interested in achieving a good workflow between other free packages, but that's very important for many of us.
Also about the point of icons being made of a single color vs. multiple colors... well, maybe is matter of taste, but i like icons to be distinctive in shape and colors. A single shade of a color won't make them inherently "better", rather the contrary (IMHO). Adobe has done that (single color icons with minimum saturation) and is a hit-and-miss approach. In one hand they won't distract the user, on the other difficulties on picking and telling apart tools might arise (i'm talking about experience).
That's something that can be discussed of course. The single shades thing was a suggestion based on how the other applications implemented their icons and on the idea that primitives are sort of "blank" objects, not something with a pre-defined style. Of course the rapid identification of the icons is a valid argument in favour of the colored icons. But I think that when it comes to frequent use items as toolbar icons users tend to memorize the position of the icon more than its shape or color. And that's why you can't find anything when you go from Inkscape to Illustrator, for instance.
I could agree that the current icons could use some improvements here and there but bashing them and sustituting them just based on those arguments seems a bit unfair to me. Why we don't try to see what current icons are worth for and improve from that? or improve the Preferences dialog to let the user choose easily between icons sets? As english say "don't throw the baby with the bathwater".
It's not about bashing the current set. But there's a proposal to replace a set with a lot of problems for a complete, stylized and systematized set. The current Tango set has coherence. The current default set has a lot of style problems (some have chiseled look, some don't, some have saturated colors, some don't, some have outlines, some don't, there isn't apparently a color palette or some guides about how to combine the colors). It's functional, but it has a lot of problems. And fixing all those problems would require an incredible amount of work, a work that has already been done in the Tango set. You may dislike the Tango set, but you can't deny that the current state is more streamlined and look more polished if you put two screenshots together.
My suggestion was to put Tango as default just to see the users reaction. As a test. Another solution would be to add a GUI for selecting different themes present in the icons folder. But I still think that a finished set is better for the default look.
Gez.