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

[Tobias Oelgarte <tobias oelgarte googlemail com>]

Am 22.06.2012 18:20, schrieb Guillermo Espertino (Gez):
> 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.
At the same time icons can provide a basic idea on what to expect. They 
are only bad if they are not of the same style, badly designed or 
incomplete. In the current situation i tried to add icons to all 
relevant (mostly used) entries and it looked way better and intuitive. 
In situations with a list of similar commands an icon should focus on 
the difference between this commands, especially if the commands are 
named in a similar way. A good example would be mask or boolean operations.

http://i1-win.softpedia-static.com/screenshots/Windows-Portable-Applications-Portable-Inkscape_7.png
> 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.
I guess we can agree that the save and export functions are important 
for everyone. Thats why i would propose to give it a icon, even so on 
some systems/desktops they might not be visible.
> > 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.
In that case i have to congratulate you for the useful and well 
distinguishable icons. They are really good help for beginners. From my 
experience beginners tend to remember icons much faster as the name of 
the function itself.

Tobias Oelgarte