Re: Application specific themable icons

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

On Mon, 2007-01-15 at 10:57 -0600, Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-12-15 at 11:49 +0100, Luca Ferretti wrote:
> > Here [1] is a page about application specific themable icons (named
> > icons installed by application outside the system-wide hicolor
> > directory).
> > 
> > Feel free to edit (by now it's just a draf), implement suggested changes
> > in your applications and add new subpages listing icons installed by
> > your application[2] (useful for theme maker people).
> > 
> > Thanks to Rodney Dawes for the original idea[3].
> > 
> > [1] http://live.gnome.org/ThemableAppIcons
> > [2] http://live.gnome.org/ThemableAppIcons/EpiphanySpecificIcons
> > [3] http://wayofthemonkey.com/index.php?date=2006-11-15&month=11&year=2006
> 
> I participated a bit in some of the xdg-list discussions about
> doing this, and I was a big proponent of having the application
> theme directory contain directories for each theme, rather than
> just have a single set of fallback icons.  For me, the big reason
> was that applications could provide accessibility versions of all
> their custom icons.

There is no reason they can't do this. In fact, this is exactly what
my recommendations here, allow you to do. You can just stick a
HighContrast or whatever other theme, alongside the hicolor theme,
in the app-private icons directory, and things will Just Work (TM),
assuming you complete the rest of the puzzle.

> What I also wanted was a standard "fallback" theme for each of
> our accessibility themes, much like hicolor is a fallback for
> other themes.  That is, our actual high contrast theme would
> continue to be HighContrast, but it would inherit from some
> other theme, like hicontrast.  That would, in turn, inherit
> from hicolor.  Applications could then install high contrast
> versions of all their custom icons in hicontrast.
> 
> Perhaps Rodney knows if there was any further discussion about
> this.  It would certainly be nice for applications to be able
> to provide for accessibility needs without being tied to one
> desktop.  And the current trend of having our accessibility
> themes try to provide everything for every application just
> doesn't scale.

I don't think there is any disagreement to wanting standard
accessibility themes across the desktops. The KDE people on the
XDG list expressed only interest in doing that, when it came up.
I don't think there has been any activity in getting it done, though.

There have also been numerous suggestions of other ways to do the
accessible themes, including automatically deriving such icons from
the selected theme's icons. Andy Fitzsimon demoed a little bit of the
work he'd been doing on this, at the GNOME Summit in October. In the
end, this may end up being the best route to take, as it could mean
that all themes are automatically accessible, and we can avoid doing
the same work over and over again in a bunch of different files in
different themes, spread across the disk, allowing us to pick up a
little performance benefit too.

-- dobey