[Tango-artists] Icons for inclusion

[Rodney Dawes]

On Wed, 2007-02-28 at 17:16 +0100, Mathias Brodala wrote:
> A few comments about them:
> 
> Icons should not contain letters since their meaning is not obvious to everyone
> and not everyone uses the same letters. (Think of non-latin languages.)

While this may be true in many contexts, it is not so in the context of
programming, for the most part. Anyone writing code in C, C++, C#,
Python, Perl, and many other languages, is going to be writing code in
the US-ASCII charset. It is not even full latin-1. The really annoying
bit is that screenreaders can't read icons, and having text generally
won't give the icon the distinct shape it might need.

> Thus the header and c-source icons don’t look right to me.

The real reason to avoid text in icons is because, if you are putting
text in the icon, you are most likely just replicating text elsewhere in
the UI. Icons are meant to be graphic representations of labels, not
simply the label itself, in a different font/color. I think these icons
aren't as good as they could be, simply because they aren't adding
anything significant to the visual experience. Every C file in a source
directory has a .c extension, and I can see that already. I think having
the C in an icon on top of a paper sheet, combined with similar icons
for .h or .cpp, will just make the file manager view more distracting.

> And the Makefile icon looks cluttered to me since there’s to much going on at
> it. This will become obvious if you try to create the lower resolution versions.
> The idea of the conversion from source text to a binary file is not quite bad,
> but you should go with a much simpler approach.
> 
> I for myself prefer the Makefile icon[0] from the Unabashed Tango Theme[1]. It
> tells me directly and without thinking about that it has something to do with
> building something. And that’s what it does.

I myself, prefer differences of most significance. For example, I don't
care what the bunch of source files in my tree are. I know they are C
source files, or header files, or Makefiles, or whatever. These are the
things that most all projects have. And when I'm editing the source, or
going to open a file from the file manager to edit, I know which is
which very easily, because the file names are useful, and because I know
that the file manager sorts things alphabetically. However, what I
really care to be able to differentiate from the rest of the source,
easily, are patches. They are the important part in my development.
There may be bugs in the software, and a lack of feature-completeness,
so that the wrong generic icon is shown for a file type, such as having
a text paper sheet icon for object files, but I think those should be
classified as bugs in the software, not the icon theme, because they
are. The theme itself cannot govern what icons are used where. That is
up to the software that requests the icon from the theme.

-- dobey