Re: Re[2]: [lmi] using standard icon sizes and wxArtProvider

[Vaclav Slavik]

Hi,

On Wed, 2008-08-27 at 00:39 +0200, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
>  I'm usually opposed to using drop down toolbar buttons because toolbar is
> supposed to contain buttons giving _quick_ access to common operations and
> a drop down slows access down but here it seems to be appropriate and the
> print operation is not invoked so often as to make an extra menu choice too
> much of an obstacle IMHO.

I agree it is be appropriate _if_ one of the print actions is much more
commonly used than the other two. In that case, clicking the button
would run the most common variant and clicking the "expand arrow" or
holding the mouse on it would let you choose the variant you want. (I
quite liked this in KMail, where the Forward tool would have Forward
inline, Forward as attachment and Redirect under it.)

That still leaves menu icons for print actions unresolved, but I'd argue
that it's better (again, if one of the variants is most common) to not
use icons for the rarely used print actions in the menu.

>  Subjectively, I don't like the icons in that set much but OTOH I think
> it's always better to use a distinctive icon theme for a program if
> possible because the standard icons are certainly nice but there are simply
> not enough of them and using a mix of custom and standard icons is the
> worst you can do.

On Linux, I disagree: using the standard stock icons and supplementing
them with custom icons *in the same style* is the best thing to do,
simply because the user expects the standard look, is used to it and is
trained to recognize stock icons immediately. Of course, on Windows
there are no stock/standard icons to use in the first place.

To be more specific than that, I think it's worth using icons that
follow the freedesktop's Tango guidelines
(http://tango.freedesktop.org). That's what GNOME uses these days and
Tango is specifically designed to blend well on other platforms too,
including Windows. So with this style, we would get reasonable look on
both platforms and we can still reuse stock icons (by updating the
unmodified icons to their GNOME 2.22 versions and doing LMI-specific
modifications in the same style).

Regards,
Vaclav