[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] gtk+ builtin stock icons removed

[From: Tommi Komulainen]

Let me reiterate the consequences of removing the builtin stock icons
(not items, icons): it has no ill effect on stock menu items or stock
buttons (the icon has always been considered optional, see
gtk-button-images and gtk-menu-images GtkSettings.)

The only places where things might get broken is when the builtin stock
icon is the only piece of information provided to the user such as in
the toolbar in an appview - gtk+ toolbars should always have icon+text
information provided as per HIG and a11y guidelines. Icons should be
used only in addition to other forms of providing information, relying
on icons only (in gtk+) is questionable already.

So only a very small part of applications should be impacted. Yes it is
a bit more work to really integrate with the maemo platform, but much
less than porting to HildonApp.

And in case there are any misconceptions about priorities, product comes
first, Hildonized apps second, running unmodified gtk+ apps is plus.

Removing stock icons has only positive impact on the product and only a
minor negative impact on a subset of other apps. And the effort spent
was around half an hour to implement. From where I'm sitting that's
quite cost-efficient.

For the most parts our priorities are well aligned with those of other
developers and we try to keep it that way. When some of our decisions
doesn't align perfectly with the outside it usually just means that we
don't have the resources to do things perfectly so we choose to do
something that works for us. If it doesn't work for you we need you to
fill in the gap. (In fact I have a patch waiting in my inbox, thanks
Skyhusker, but I haven't had the time to look at it closely yet.)

There's probably a more simple solution to make stock icons work well;
just add "gtk-bold.png" and similarly named files in the hicolor icon
theme and things should just work. However the current solution works
for us, so it is not high in our priority list to do this work.

(In the longer term we should have correct size images to replace the
stock icons as the stock sizes don't quite match ours.. but again, it
would take more time.)


On Wed, 2005-10-26 at 19:32 +0200, ext Florian Boor wrote:
> UI guidelines (e.g. the Gnome HIG) suggest to use a set of well
> known symbols for common operations which is a really good idea if you want
> users to feel familiar with their applications - another important feature you
> will loose with this.

In our UI guidelines menu items or buttons don't have icons so this is a
moot point. Yes, the implementation could be better, but the end result
would still be the same for most parts.


> Additionally it might be a good idea to replace the builtin icons with maemo
> style icons... currently some of them look pretty good (like the arrows, useful
> to replace the broken GtkArrows in the default theme), but some look very different.

This is a good idea, and we should've done that long time ago. But we
didn't and there's only so much we can do in the short term now.
 

-- 
Tommi Komulainen                            <tommi.komulainen at nokia.com>