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GNOME Decides to Ditch Drawings (Linux Journal)
Linux Journal covers
a recent decision to simplify menus by leaving out the icons.
"According to a blog
post by Andreas Nilsson of the GNOME Art Team, a new policy on icon use
has been adopted for future versions. In addition to adding larger icons
for certain locales, the team has decided that the default value of the
gtk-menu-images property in future GNOME releases will be changed to false,
eliminating most of the icons used in menus. (This would include those used
to represent "Open," "Save," and other similar dialogues.) The team feels
it will produce a "visually more attractive default and that it will result
in a cleaner and more efficient interface.""
(Log in to post comments)
GNOME Decides to Ditch Drawings (Linux Journal) Posted Aug 4, 2009 22:04 UTC (Tue) by xorbe (subscriber, #3165) [Link]
In other news, KDE announced it will support animated MPEG4 icons for menus ...
;-)
GNOME Decides to Ditch Drawings (Linux Journal) Posted Aug 4, 2009 22:19 UTC (Tue) by Sho (subscriber, #8956) [Link]
Nah. We'll use Phonon to support video icons in any format supported by its pluggable backends, cross-platform.
Kidding aside, here's how it actually works in KDE:
- There's an option to enable/disable icons on buttons. It defaults to on, and applies regardless of the used style engine.
- Icons in menus are non-optional settings-wise, but I believe the style engine has the power to provide such an option / ignore menu icons.
(A style engine is a body of code implementing the rendering of interface elements, such as menus, buttons, frames, scrollbars, etc.)
GNOME Decides to Ditch Drawings (Linux Journal) Posted Aug 4, 2009 22:24 UTC (Tue) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link]
This is the first time I've ever seen anything about a Gnome UI "improvement" that had me nodding rather than grimacing. I hope to see a lot more of this kind of thing. :)
GNOME Decides to Ditch Drawings (Linux Journal) Posted Aug 4, 2009 22:36 UTC (Tue) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
Yes, bravo to whoever shepherded this beautiful idea through what I expect was a horrendous gauntlet.
GNOME Decides to Ditch Drawings (Linux Journal) Posted Aug 5, 2009 8:09 UTC (Wed) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link]
The example of a current UI with icons is interesting, in part because it is not a GNOME project, and also because the icons aren't so good. Maybe that is why it is the example:
http://gnomefx.mozdev.org/blue-file.png
There's repeated icons, there's a missing icon, the outlines of the icons aren't varied enough, and then there's the icon with a magnifying lens. This time it doesn't mean search or magnify. It is for a view (print preview).
GNOME Decides to Ditch Drawings (Linux Journal) Posted Aug 5, 2009 8:49 UTC (Wed) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
While Firefox isn't a Gnome app, apparently the theme it's using in that screenshot is one specifically written to make Firefox fit in well with Gnome. And I gather that one of the impressive things about the theme is that it does a better job of implementing the old official policy for menu icons than anything else. And this is two of the reasons why they changed that policy :-). (The first being that no-one gets close to implementing it properly, and the second being that if you did, it would suck.)
GNOME Decides to Ditch Drawings (Linux Journal) Posted Aug 5, 2009 8:59 UTC (Wed) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
>There's repeated icons, there's a missing icon, the outlines of the icons aren't varied enough, and then there's the icon with a magnifying lens. This time it doesn't mean search or magnify. It is for a view (print preview).
Uhm, all that seems to be a mishap of the default GNOME theme. If you install, say, gtk2-theme-nimbus, you don't get repeated icons, and the print preview also has no magnifying glass, though of course, you have to take a few more empty spots for it.
GNOME Decides to Ditch Drawings (Linux Journal) Posted Aug 5, 2009 13:49 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Next time a better example of Gnome UI would be to use a Gnome application or at least a GTK application.. of which Firefox is neither. :)
GNOME Decides to Ditch Drawings (Linux Journal) Posted Aug 19, 2009 8:58 UTC (Wed) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link]
Firefox on linux does indeed use libgtk.
icons are useful for other languages Posted Aug 5, 2009 14:15 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] For people who regularly or sometimes use computers that have their interfaces set to different languages, icons can be useful to spot the equivalence of two menu options. Textual names for things are sometimes arbitrary and not meaningfully translatable.
icons are useful for other languages Posted Aug 5, 2009 17:17 UTC (Wed) by mosfet (guest, #45339) [Link]
This is a very special case and should not influence the Human Interface Guidelines.
I don't want to have to learn a new "icon language" for every program family/desktop environment. Plain simple words say more then 10.000 different nifty icons for complex operations.
Icons are good for distinguishing different objects (like programs) and simple actions. They suck for complex actions / notifications. If you want to see icon hell, start eclipse.
icons are useful for other languages Posted Aug 27, 2009 22:29 UTC (Thu) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]
As an eclipse user, I do not really see the icon hell you are talking about.
The icons that I see mostly live in the project tree and class outlines, and they are used to classify between different types of things. There are many kinds of icons because there are many types of things.
The icons are decorated with additional symbols in order to encode more information like version control status in it. I don't think that use case means there is now twice or triple the amount of icons. The idea of decorating is pretty simple to understand, too.
To me, it all looks pretty good. No icons in menus, you can customize the toolbar if you hate its icons... Maybe you complain about the tabs usually at bottom right with labels like "Markers", "Properties", "Servers"... Err, I don't know. What did you mean, specifically?
icons are useful for other languages Posted Aug 6, 2009 3:06 UTC (Thu) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
Thankfully, if I understand this news item correctly, you can just change the default for this case.
icons are useful for other languages Posted Aug 6, 2009 3:39 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
Yup. It's weird how much commentary you can get for a simple decision like "change the default from X to Y". Maybe the good old "bikeshed" effect.
AFAICT they're not even removing the UI for this, they really are just changing a built-in default. A checkbox now defaults to unchecked in GNOME and it got an article and almost a dozen comments.
icons are useful for other languages Posted Aug 6, 2009 16:29 UTC (Thu) by orev (subscriber, #50902) [Link]
Microsoft learned a long time ago, and everyone should take heed of, whatever the default is set to is the king, and almost no one will change it. That's why the question of what the default should be can become such a contested topic.
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