GTK default icons used in several places

Right, there were icons in tango-common, which were removed, because Andreas was not happy with them, I subscribe him again, so we can get his input on it.

I think Andreas once had a nice non-official "gtk-apply" checkmark that was curved somehow. It would be good if one of the three main Tango/g-i-t contributors would whip something up for the remaining stock/gtk-* icons. After all those are shown on almost every dialog window. The ones that were removed from the package looked a bit non-standard, bulky and specifically the cancel icon looked awkward.
Is it just because they are not in the naming spec?

Please put those icons back at least until you come up with something better, the current ones make the Child Jesus cry.

http://www.imageshack.us/

Seriously, you think that's acceptable? Please give me a break!

Sorry, I didn't post the image to compare:

http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/839/pantallazopreferenciaswk9.png

Yes, we definitely need them back. My eyes are about ready to burn out from the old icons.

We decided to remove the dialog-* since we had to many complains about them, especially the dialog-cancel icon. I put them in tango-common because I was curious about the effect of these somewhat unorthodox metaphors, but they were not really popular.
I hope these actions can be placed in tango-icon-theme and gnome-icon-theme where they belong soon, but I'm afraid it can't be made for edgy as it will use version 2.16 of gnome-icon-theme (not sure about tango-icon-theme).
Regarding dialog-ok, the icon used in the ok-buttons I think it should be removed from the naming-spec. Ok is a weird word to put in a button and these buttons should use verbs like "remove", "install", "set" etc instead.
Install/Remove Applications in the Applications menu for example has a ok button right now for example. That button should say "Install" (just like the update manager do).
Sorry for the inconvenience, I hope we can have this fixed soon, the right way.

I agree, but it will probably never happen that all apps finally conform to what the HIG recommends about buttons. The other point is that the icons transport a sense of benign-ness of the actions and facilitate the decision of the user when he is presented a binary choice, for example. So, green, checkmark, Enter sign, et cetera always mean "go ahead", "yes", "OK", "perform the action that the dialog prompted me for" and vice versa for red, cross, etc. I can well imagine that an "Install" button goes well with that blue Enter symbol.
So, until the point where there is an icon for every verb possible in a dialog[1] we should come up with a more fancy version of those old dialog-* icons.
Do we always need a specific icon for a button or is a specific label enough?

[1] Install, Update, Format, Download, Connect, Rename, Publish, Convert, Build, Capture, et cetera pp ad inf.

As an addendum:
What I proposed is similar to the strategy currently implemented for MIME-types. There’s a generic "image" MIME-type icon that subsumes all sub-types of images until all those myriads of image types can be provides by special icons.
I propose to add a generic "do action" icon that is a placeholder for the possible later "do $ACTION" icons.

I agree that it's a bit silly to belive that every app is going to conform to the HIG about button labeling, but I think our approach should be to try to clean them out where we can. I'm going to file a bug against gnome-app-install right away. Anyone want to help tracking it down in other applications?
Regarding the do-action-icon, isn't the most likley action selected by default in most apps already?
As you have specific verbs for almost every dialog, I'm not sure it's a good idea to add icons to it as it would mean a dozen icons for every application, and we're low on artists, I would rather make sure as many application icons as possible follow the style guidelines first. I also think that the verb in itself should be so good that you don't have to use a picture to get the message across.
Sorry for sounding like a ass and shooting your ideas down, but I really think we should try to get smarter with icon usage, because the current situation is horrible.

Fair enough, really.
Just one point about the default action. In many GTK themes the style for the default button is not really salient (check Clearlooks to see; it is salient in the Human theme, though). An affirmative/negative icon would help the user click one button, IMO.

These are all valid points. What I care about is what the final release will look like. I think after all the effort that's being put into the artwork to provide a consistent-looking release, it would really ruin the whole thing if edgy were to ship with those ugly icons. I mean the OK-icon (stupid as it may be) before was also a green checkmark only a nicer one that *fit* to the rest of the icons. Why did it have to go?
I'm sure an equally nice Cancel icon can be provided if the yellow "go-back" cancel button is the problem.

I also really don't think that forcing ugly icons on people is the right way to get them to change their dialogs. That will take a long time and might not even be possible at all. For instance all my wxWidgets apps use OK and Cancel buttons for all simple dialogs, not because I chose to do it this way but because wxWidgets does this by default.

I think people ar not going to say: "Gee, that does look ugly, the app is broken, let's file a bug report!", they're going to say, "Well, my apps really look ugly and inconsistent on Ubuntu"...

So don't get me wrong, I'm all for doing it the Right Way(TM), but at the same time I think edgy should release with a consistent icon theme.

And thanks for your efforts!

"These are all valid points. What I care about is what the final release will look like. I think after all the effort that's being put into the artwork to provide a consistent-looking release, it would really ruin the whole thing if edgy were to ship with those ugly icons".

I agree 100%. I'm not sure I understand your button symbology, but I know I don't want to be stuck with those ugly ass icons for another 6 months, neither do I understand how the current ugly ass green checkmark is better than the previous nice green checkmark, or how the ugly ass shitty brown enter icon we have now is better than the nice sky blue enter icon we had before.

On Fri, 15 Sep 2006 14:26:12 +0200, Mika Fischer <email address hidden>
wrote:

> I also really don't think that forcing ugly icons on people is the right
> way to get them to change their dialogs. That will take a long time and
> might not even be possible at all. For instance all my wxWidgets apps
> use OK and Cancel buttons for all simple dialogs, not because I chose to
> do it this way but because wxWidgets does this by default.

That’s exactly the line of thought, unfortunately.
This is what Rodney, the g-i-t and icon-naming-utils maintainer said about
the issue:

On Mi, 2006-08-09 at 09:19 -0400, Rodney Dawes wrote:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/tango-artists/2006-August/000639.html

[cut]

Also, the GTK_STOCK_EDIT icon is an icon that is often inappropriately
used, and I believe the metaphor is perhaps not too great. I think a
better goal would be to look at what metaphor/icon would be best in the
situations where GTK_STOCK_EDIT is currently being used, rather than
simply making the current icon look a bit prettier. In the latter case,
it will be "good enough" and other issues will be forgotten, while
keeping it as it is now, will make the icon stick out, and make people
want to fix it, like you want to do. However, I don't think simply
replacing the icon is the proper fix here.

--dobey
[end-of-message]

towolf wrote:
>> I also really don't think that forcing ugly icons on people is the right
>> way to get them to change their dialogs.
> That’s exactly the line of thought, unfortunately.
> This is what Rodney, the g-i-t and icon-naming-utils maintainer said about
> the issue:
> [cut]
> Also, the GTK_STOCK_EDIT icon is an icon that is often inappropriately
> used, and I believe the metaphor is perhaps not too great. I think a
> better goal would be to look at what metaphor/icon would be best in the
> situations where GTK_STOCK_EDIT is currently being used, rather than
> simply making the current icon look a bit prettier. In the latter case,
> it will be "good enough" and other issues will be forgotten, while
> keeping it as it is now, will make the icon stick out, and make people
> want to fix it, like you want to do. However, I don't think simply
> replacing the icon is the proper fix here.

So perhaps an alternative may be to have to ugly icons during the
development cycle (like the test-usplash in edgy). That would make it
easy to spot broken dialogs and file bugs/fix them.

But before releasing replace the icons with nice ones so that our users
are not scared away by an inconsistent and unprofessional-looking release.

Actually it was inconsistent before as well, as Ubuntu use the Human icon set by default and Human don't have these icons, so it used to fall back on the icons provided by tango-common.

Andreas Nilsson schrieb:
> Actually it was inconsistent before as well, as Ubuntu use the Human
> icon set by default and Human don't have these icons, so it used to fall
> back on the icons provided by tango-common.

That may well be. But for the artwork layman such as me that did not
stand out in any way. The icons in dapper seemed consistent to me.

The icons in edgy's dialog look like they're from the last century and
they probably are...

Again, my issue is with how Ubuntu will be percieved by normal users.
And these icons are a huge step in the wrong direction.

Moving this to human-icon-theme, as the reporter used that theme and because human is the default.

Should we file similar bugs for tango-icon-theme and tangerine-icon-theme then?

I don't use human anyway, so it wouldn't be of much use to me having this fixed in human.

Hang on, the premise is wrong here. The HIGs can be a bit confusing in some places, but nowhere do they say that "OK" and "Cancel" should be abolished! It's true that "OK" should be replaced by more informative text, if possible, in dialogs and in confirmation alerts. But "OK" *must* be the text of the main button in an error alert or an information alert, "Cancel" *should* be the text of the second button in a dialog or a confirmation alert, and "Cancel" *should* be the text of the button in a progress window whenever the operation can be properly cancelled.

Personally I think none of these buttons should ever have icons, but as long as they have any icon, the icon should look nice. I'm all in favor of using ugliness during development to encourage developers to follow a policy -- but first, make sure the policy actually exists. :-)

Additionally, If the problem is only with the OK and cancel buttons, why has the tick icon been removed too? I mean, why does the liferea menu have to look this bad?

http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/8201/pantallazolifereatq6.png

mpt: ok, I trust you on this.

David: they were removed because they don't really belong in that package and I was unsure about the metaphors. Hopefully the iconfactory-dude will fix these in human-icon-theme, as they seem to be priority 10 in http://daniel.holba.ch/ubuntu/ic . I want to keep tango-icon-theme and gnome-icon-theme as close to upstream if it's ok and we're going to fix it there soon.

"David: they were removed because they don't really belong in that package and I was unsure about the metaphors."

Right, I understand the part about it not belonging there. I'm unsure however, about a pretty greeen tick's metaphor being different to a an ugly green tick's.

"Hopefully the iconfactory-dude will fix these in human-icon-theme, as they seem to be priority 10 in http://daniel.holba.ch/ubuntu/ic"

Can I get this right? does that mean that if I use the human icon theme I'll get the pretty icons, but if I use tango I'll get the ugly ones?

"we're going to fix it there soon."

So, to sum up, what are the expected results for the time Edgy goes gold?

human-icon-theme (0.3-0ubuntu1) edgy; urgency=low

  * New upstream release:
    - added icons.
    - add gtk-apply and gtk-ok (fixes part of Malone: #60424)
    - added Eject icon (Malone: #59662)
    - reload icon in 24x24 (Malone: #47268)

 -- Daniel Holbach <email address hidden> Fri, 22 Sep 2006 10:41:09 +0200

so tango and tangerine will still show the ugly-looking icons? :-(

I only marked human-icon-theme as "fix released". That's something the maintainers of those packages have to decide.

Guess we should file some bugs on tango and tangerine, right?

Just open Tango and Tangerine tasks on this bug.

I found this bug where OK/cancel icons were proposed:

https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/tangerine-icon-theme/+bug/40607

And these are the icons:

http://ramnet.se/~nisse/diverse/temp/tango/okncancel.tar.gz

Surely the proposed red cross's metaphor is not different from the current, ugly red cross? I don't think the proposed green tick's metaphor differs from the present, ugly green tick.

So, why give the user ugly button icons when they could have ones that are basically the same, only they look good instead of crappy?

I'm not sure that closed duplicate bug is the best place to talk about that, maybe you could mail the artwork list about that?