Hi All,
I notice that some of Wine's icons have been changed in recent releases. In principle I think updating the icons is a great idea, but right now I gotta say that icons in Wine are a real disaster.
Take a look here: http://www.airwebreathe.org.uk/icons.png
This is a screenshot of the shell folder select dialog. Out of those icons My Documents looks the least broken - with it's wannabe 98/ME/2000 styling. Desktop, "/", My Computer and Trash look like they've been taken from large icons which have shrunk - badly, and with a broken alpha channel. And the new golden Folder icons look completely out of place - they bear no resemblance to anything else, they've been scaled down poorly, they don't look like Windows icons, and they don't fit in with the Gnome desktop (and I can't imagine they'd look good in KDE or on Mac either).
I'd really like for Wine to start using icons from the Tango project, or similar. The purpose of Tango was to create a set of icons that are clear to see, and look good on Windows, Gnome, KDE, and MacOS. Surely that's exactly what we want?
Note that ReactOS is using Tango, and it seems to be working out pretty well for them!
Any comments on that?
Best Regards Joel Holdsworth
Hi Joel,
I notice that some of Wine's icons have been changed in recent releases. In principle I think updating the icons is a great idea, but right now I gotta say that icons in Wine are a real disaster.
I agree with you, they look pretty poor.
And the new golden Folder icons look completely out of place - they bear no resemblance to anything else, they've been scaled down poorly, they don't look like Windows icons, and they don't fit in with the Gnome desktop (and I can't imagine they'd look good in KDE or on Mac either).
I opened a bug for the folder icons: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15810
The problem that I see with the new SVG icon support is that we use icotool to create the small-size icons from the SVG when the SVG is available. This rarely works well. I think we need to maintain hand-drawn small-size icons, and optionally use SVG to generate larger-size (larger than 32x32) icons.
Some of the icons, as you say, don't look consistent. You might try bugging Herve, as he's been redrawing all the icons.
As far as whether to use Tango, I have no opinion there. --Juan
Hi Juan,
The problem that I see with the new SVG icon support is that we use icotool to create the small-size icons from the SVG when the SVG is available. This rarely works well. I think we need to maintain hand-drawn small-size icons, and optionally use SVG to generate larger-size (larger than 32x32) icons.
You're absolutely right.
I'm the GUI maintainer for Lumiera, and we're generating our icons from SVGs. Each icon has to be specially adopted for each of the standard small sizes. We've adopted the "one canvas" icon workflow that Tango artists seem to be working toward. This is a video demonstrating the technique: http://blip.tv/file/1075329
Basically it involves drawing a basic icon, then tweaking it so that it looks good for different sizes. The SVG file is then "rigged" by putting in invisible bounding boxes marked with XML metadata (this can all be done in inkscape). We then have a python script* that then walks through the SVG, rendering all bounding boxes that it finds marked with the metadata.
Here's an example of one of our SVGs: http://www.lumiera.org/gitweb?p=lumiera/joel;a=blob_plain;f=icons/svg/tool-a...
As you can see, the icon has been tweaked to look good at 48x48, 32x32, 22x22 (24x24 is also produced from this size), and 16x16. The "One Canvas Workflow" makes it very easy to make consistent changes instead of having to keep hundreds of different files in synch.
You might try bugging Herve, as he's been redrawing all the icons.
I find that a bit alarming. I'm sure he's working very hard, and doing good stuff, but I don't think Wine should be redrawing anything. Not when we have Tango around - it's designed to try create some consistency through standardisation. IMO standards are really good! - we use them if we possibly can.
Joel
* see here: http://www.lumiera.org/gitweb?p=lumiera/joel;a=blob;f=admin/render-icon.py;h...
I'm the GUI maintainer for Lumiera, and we're generating our icons from SVGs. Each icon has to be specially adopted for each of the standard small sizes. We've adopted the "one canvas" icon workflow that Tango artists seem to be working toward. This is a video demonstrating the technique: http://blip.tv/file/1075329
That video didn't work for me.
Basically it involves drawing a basic icon, then tweaking it so that it looks good for different sizes. The SVG file is then "rigged" by putting in invisible bounding boxes marked with XML metadata (this can all be done in inkscape). We then have a python script* that then walks through the SVG, rendering all bounding boxes that it finds marked with the metadata.
Interesting. That might be worth trying to get into our build process. Care to have a go?
I find that a bit alarming. I'm sure he's working very hard, and doing good stuff, but I don't think Wine should be redrawing anything. Not when we have Tango around - it's designed to try create some consistency through standardisation. IMO standards are really good! - we use them if we possibly can.
The trouble is that the Tango icon set doesn't cover all the icons Wine needs. There's no Tango icon for regedit, for instance. While I agree with you that as a general rule, we should try to use available and applicable standards, sometimes there's something more expedient we could be doing.
The basic problem you bring up is an inconsistent look for icons. There are two general solutions proposed: use Tango icons, and use a combination of theming and fd.o icons. There's something simpler we can do too, which is to have someone draw all the Wine icons with a consistent look. They won't necessarily match whatever desktop environment you're running in, but least they'll be consistent with one another. This, I believe, is what Herve's trying to do.
But anyway, I'm not working on any of this stuff. Wine's driven by our contributors. If you'd like to see it done differently, by all means send patches! --Juan
On Friday 14 November 2008 19:13:32 Juan Lang wrote:
I find that a bit alarming. I'm sure he's working very hard, and doing good stuff, but I don't think Wine should be redrawing anything. Not when we have Tango around - it's designed to try create some consistency through standardisation. IMO standards are really good! - we use them if we possibly can.
The trouble is that the Tango icon set doesn't cover all the icons Wine needs. There's no Tango icon for regedit, for instance.
IIRC there's Tango icon sets for specific applications. If we're doing our own icons anyway, we could try to keep them coherent with the rest of the Tango look and get the icons upstream to Tango.
This seems like the most reasonable approach. Of course the only things I usually paint are walls so I'd have no idea how easy it is to match the Tango specs when designing icons.
Cheers, Kai
-
Joel Holdsworth -
Juan Lang -
Kai Blin