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

[From: Philippe De Swert]

Hi,

> i don't think 30k is worth making it a major pain maintaining applications which
> support both plain GTK and Hildon UI. But that's my personal opinion.
> In addition to this you loose a pile of convenient functions to deal with the
> stock icons. 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.

I do agree with this.

> 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.

Replacing the icons with the maemo ones makes more sense. It will make it
easier to port applications. For example programs that use the stock gtk icons
wont need to replace them to make them more consistent with the maemo/hildon
look. Saving the effort of a lot of ifdefs if the program is intended to be
running on other systems too, if the porter is even willing to do so...

Performance wise it might improve application performance for maemo apps as
they will not have to load the icons from flash, instead they will be directly
available. On top of that programming is a bit easier too and there is no risk
of letting out icons by accident (however I have to admit with a standard icon
set that chances are pretty slim)

Anyway I believe removing the stock gtk icons will also decrease the interest
of developers wanting to port their applications. For a performance
improvement that is probabely negligable. (GPE just copes fine with those
stock icons in) There might be better things to go after, unfortunately my gtk
knowlegde is not that good... (yet)

Regards,

Philippe
 
| Philippe De Swert       
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| GPE developer: http://gpe.handhelds.org 
| Emdebian developer: http://www.emdebian.org  
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