Re: [Gimp-developer] Bring back normal handling of other file formats

["Guillermo Espertino (Gez)" <gespertino gmail com>]

El 22/06/12 05:30, Tobias Oelgarte escribió:
> Actually i love icons and would miss them. If they are placed wisely 
> and are easily distinguishable then i don't even need to read the 
> text, which improves my working speed significantly. A good example 
> for the use of icons is nearly every media player. Who does not 
> understand the "play/stop/pause/..." buttons that just use a typical 
> icon instead of text? I compare icons to Japanese kanji where 
> recognizing a single character is a whole different experience 
> compared to reading latin letters that form a word.

I don't have anything against icons, but I do agree with gnome folks (or 
was it free desktop?) regarding how much they clutter menus if every 
item has one and how they "hide" functions when an item hasn't an icon 
and the rest have.
Icons in a quick bar are indeed useful and help to reduce interruptions, 
but in menus thet are problematic (they have to be very small and still 
recognisable, if you have dozens of them in every section it becomes 
pretty hard to identify them).
Of course a "play, stop, pause" set of icons is easy to identify. 
They're simple geometric shapes illustrating simple concepts.
But what about "crop layer to selection" or "add mask to selection"? 
What about filters? When the concept to illustrate becomes more complex, 
it's harder to create a identifiable icon. Check inkscape, for instance.

What's the criterion to choose which commands have icons and which 
don't? Frequency of use? For whom? Different kind of users use different 
kind of tools. What's useful for me can be something rarely used for you.

> But in case of Gimps File menu we have not very well distinguishable 
> icons, placed in a bad way (wrong weighting) and not really good 
> placed items in general. I mean what has "Export..." to do with 
> "Create Template..." to be inside the same section, or why is "export 
> to" disabled if "Save" isn't?
>
> I would recommend to give the export functionality a useful icon and 
> to seperate it from "Create Template", while renaming "Save" to "Save 
> xcf" or "Save project" and "Save as..." to "Save project as/under...".

Just keep in mind that Gnome users won't see it.
Personally, I didn't miss them when I moved to Gnome 3 (actually, I 
didn't realize they were gone at first). I helped in the development of 
a tangoified set of icons for inkscape and I can remember how much work 
and how hard it was to come up with something reasonably good for menus, 
and I'm not sure we met the goal.
Relying on icons for menus takes a lot of effort nobody seems to be 
willing to make, and in my honest opinion it doesn't make a real difference.

Gez.