Re: [Usability]Simpler icon themes?

[Mathew Johnston <johnston capsaicin ca>]

Sorry that I'm not doing the 'respond below statement' concept (I
usually do), but this might work better to follow its own flow.

I think that's a good idea that you have. I can of course speek only for
myself, but frankly, in today's world, I don't usually care what the
icon is for an item... I almost always use list view. When looking at
files I tend to care about their name and mime type the most; those
happen to be in the same field for now (and I long for the day when
that's in its own metadata field on the INODE). What's not answered for
me at this point, through the GUI, is what's going to happen when I
'activate' the file, and that's a good thing to know. Right now we don't
really have any way to tell the user what's going to happen when the
file is 'activated', and I think that an icon is a fine place to do
that, since for most other purposes it's only eye candy.

There are also issues surrounding implementation, such as, what icon is
associated with a program? How is an icon associated with a program?
Does the user get to change the default icon for a program? How does
that effect launchers? How do launchers effect default application
icons? (If someone creates a launcher to a script that they created and
assigns an icon to it, should we record the icon as the default for the
script [only if it doesn't already have a default?]). Good questions :)

Neat idea, and it will be interesting to see it hashed out.

Mathew Johnston.