Re: Initial commit of abicandy.py

On Fri, 1 Dec 2006, Justin Gallardo wrote:

> Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2006 14:53:05 -0800
> From: Justin Gallardo <justin.gallardo@gmail.com>
> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@maths.tcd.ie>
> Cc: Martin Sevior <msevior@physics.unimelb.edu.au>,
> AbiWord Developer Mailing List <abiword-dev@abisource.com>
> Subject: Re: Initial commit of abicandy.py
>
> On 12/1/06, Alan Horkan <horkana@maths.tcd.ie> wrote:
> > There should not be any "fancy way", OLPC should have their own default
> > theme which plays friendly and uses the existing themes infrastructure.
> > Anything else would be broken and it countermands their own goals of
> > making easily maintainable software if the same software cannot easily be
> > run on ordinary Gnome systems.
>
> I just finished up the icons for the gtk theme for sugar. You can
> view a screenshot of them in action at
> http://staff.osuosl.org/~jirwin/images/abiwordNewIcons2.png. You can
> grab the icons out of the OLPC git
> tree(git://dev.laptop.org/git/artwork), or if you would like, I could
> tar them up and toss them your way. Just to be clear though, we did
> use themes, it was just that no other activity had used those icons
> yet, so no one had created them yet. Please let me know what you think
> of the icons, so we can get them to be as good as possible.

I know the floppy disk as a save icon is a bit flawed but I'm not so sure
about the new save icons either. I think the abiguity could be reduced a
little if you used simpler chunkier arrows for Open/Save rather than using
curved arrows similar to those in the undo icons. You might want to talk
to the developers responsible for the Gnome High Contrast Theme as I am
sure they would appreciate any opportunity to reuse your work. Also
the nature of high contrast icons forces them to go for maximum
clarity and think as much as possible about the metaphor rather than the
detail of the icon itself.

Last time this came up on the Gnome usability list I suggested perhpas
having an icon with a diagonal arrow pointing down from the upper right,
backed by a square hard drive shape so as to end up with the same
siluoette/outline as the floppy icon (a square with one corner cut off.
if this isn't making sense I can try to explain it visually).

[I still miss having B, I, and U for bold italic and underline but I
realise localising those icons for every language would be a pain in the
ass. (I remember the original Sourcegear developers going to a fair amount
of trouble to make that possible.)]

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
http://alanhorkan.livejournal.com/
Received on Sat Dec 2 00:16:51 2006