Re: Appearance properties

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Tue, 2009-11-10 at 09:04 -0500, Pierre-Luc Beaudoin wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-11-10 at 10:55 +0100, Ruben Vermeersch wrote:
> > While I generally trust designers in their judgement and I agree that
> > there was an icon overload, I now often feel a lack of icons. My menu
> > usage has slowed down because I now have to read everything instead of
> > being able to rely on icons.
> A good example of slowed down usage is Inkscape.  Open the Path menu and
> you have to read most of them to actually find "Division" where it used
> to be a quickly identifiable by its icon (not to mention that the
> difference between Division and Exclusion was better served by an icon).

That's a bug in inkscape. If it _requires_ the icons to be useful or
usable, then it should force the icons to be visible in those menu
entries.

It would have broken the same way before if a user disabled icons in the
menus themselves through the GConf key.

> > Having a ton of icons is certainly not good, but is there anything
> > that shows that having none at all is better? 
> That's my 2 cents as a user: unless studies have generally identified a
> speed up in menu usage, I would think it was a move the opposite.

There's a bugzilla with plenty of reasons behind this change. You're
more than welcome trying to second guess our esteemed community
usability people.

I think most of the anger in this thread stems from the fact that "it's
changed". Well, progress comes through changes, and nothing was ever
achieved with status quo.

Maybe we'll change our minds later, but without compelling arguments,
it's hard to make a case for reverting this change now.