Wednesday 20 April 2011

Change is sometimes good, but…

…at other times it might not be so. The example of the latter is IMHO the abrt icon. Originally it was something like this:

and now it looks like this:


What I'm getting at, you might ask. Well, the new icon obviously looks much better and more polished but has one serious problem – I have not the slightest idea what the hell does it mean. Not to talk about the tiny fact that e.g. when it appears in my [bottom] panel (which is transparent and bellow it is F15's default background) it looks like nothing more than a strange 'A'. You know, when the old red siren with exclamation mark appeared everyone could tell that something went wrong, now he'll be just confused with what the strange 'A' means.

On a side note – almost all these GNOME3 greyscale icons are IMHO either ugly (good example of this is the new input-method sys-tray icon) or unusable with any other background than what they were designed for. Please, I want my colourful icons in systray in XFCE back, tell me what to do.

On another side note – if I find the time, I'll write a, hopefully short, critique on Gnome 3 default GTK theme Adwaitha which I think has great albeit wasted potential drown in inconsistency (like some widgets are designed very nicely with evidently lots of effort being put into them while others look like half-finished lets-put-something-plain-and-suggestive-here-and-maybe-improve-it-later kind of designs).

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

> "On a side note – almost all these GNOME3 greyscale icons are IMHO either ugly (good example of this is the new input-method sys-tray icon) or unusable with any other background than what they were designed for."

If you are talking about the symbolic icons, they are SVGs and are supposed to use the foregroung color of the panel in which they are.

For example, in Gnome 3, the panel background color is black, and its foreground (text) color is white. So the icons appear white on black.

On another panel, they **should** automatically adapt to the foreground color of the panel.

If you are indeed talking about the symbolic icons and they are not taking the panel foreground color, then you should probably report a bug. :-/

I totally agree with you on the ABRT icon. Sure it's pretty, but it is suppose to convey the message « there's been a problem, you should check » to the user. Right now, it doesn't. :(

Leif said...

Perhaps the abrt icon should be something more meaningful like a bug

i.e. http://p.yusukekamiyamane.com/icons/search/fugue/icons/bug.png

Martin said...

bochecha: I'm not sure myself — I've seen some on screenshots (I'm using xfce now), seen the volume one before I switched to xfce4-mixer and now I'm seeing the input method which is basically light-grey keyboard with transparent keys. It looks ugly with all backgrounds I tried plus when the background is light grey it becomes invisible… The abrt one does not seem to be symbolic, albeit in greyscale, and works much worse on dark backgrounds than on bright ones.

Lapo said...

As bochecha notes, you're talking about symbolic icons, which are thought to be recolorable programmatically (these should be treated as text basically). That feature is gtk3 only so you won't get that in xfce which is gtk2, these icons are not intended to be used w/o the recoloring bits, hence the pale gray.
Anything requiring symbolic icons (-symbolic prefix in the icon name) should nicelly fallback to normal icons when they are not preset, so choosing a theme which doesn't inherits gnome-icon-theme should bring colorfull icons back. You could also try to uninstall gnome-icon-theme-symbolic or manually deleting /usr/share/icons/gnome/scalable/*.

mozeq said...

We went back to the old red siren icon, it's in update abrt-2.0.1-1

nicu said...

@Leif: a bug would be a bad choice, it has meaning only for the English language, is not about the functionality, see http://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/stable/icons-design.html.en