mime-type icons, a proposal

[Alexander Larsson]

On Wed, 2004-09-29 at 11:03 -0700, Ryan Gammon wrote:
> Alexander Larsson wrote:
> 
> >> It looks to me like the mac actually will change document icons based 
> >> on the explicitly specified user preference, and even goes beyond this.
> >
> >
> > Are you sure thats what happens?
> 
> 
> I tested this today -- this is indeed what happens. Screen shots:
> 
> http://gamnation.net/~ryan/rp-assigned.png
> http://gamnation.net/~ryan/it-assigned.png
> http://gamnation.net/~ryan/qt-assigned.png

I'm not sure what to think about this.
On one side, it *does* give you better hints on what will happen when
you click on it. But on the other hand its very app-centric, which some
people think is wors, and it sometimes makes it hard to tell what sort
of file it is. (For instance, the real icon doesn't have the "mp3" text
on it, so you probably can't tell it appart from a wav or realaudio
file.)

These are essentially two different approaches, app-centric and
document-type-centric. I think we'll find it hard to reach consensus on
one of them on this list. So perhaps we should make the system allow
both somehow and leave this up to the desktops?


=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
He's an obese amnesiac househusband who knows the secret of the alien 
invasion. She's a vivacious nymphomaniac safe cracker living on borrowed time. 
They fight crime!