Icons for IM programs

["Xavier Claessens" <xclaesse gmail com>]

Hi,

With all new IM clients currently under development I think we should think about some GNOME desktop integration.

Here I suggest to move protocols and status icons to gnome-icon-theme, like that we can reuse them in all GNOME applications. Actually applications like pidgin, gossip, empathy, landel and event xchat-gnome, all have almost the same icon set.

I think we should build a GNOME icon theme for all IM related icons, like new-message, status-available, etc... We already have smileys and some protocols but I think they should be updated with a more tango-like design.

The benefit of moving icons to gnome-icon-theme:
1) avoid data duplication, projects copies icons, for example empathy's icons are stolen from landel or gossip
2) avoid work duplication for the tango-team, for example the new-message icon for xchat-gnome is almost the same for pidgin and for gossip, but AFAIK it has been done from scratch for each project
3) users can change icons by simply install a new icon theme, actually they have to change the whole client... or some clients like pidgin have their own icon theme manager which is a dup of gnome (freedesktop?) icon theme system.

I would like hear the opinion of developers from all IM clients and tango artists to see if we can create a common icon set.

Thanks,
Xavier Claessens.