GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 361121
Pan 1.0 icon love
Last modified: 2006-10-13 15:12:19 UTC
The pan rewrite is shaping up wonderfully but what it still misses is some visual appeal. The toolbars/menus have been cleared up a bit but they still a) use compiled in icons b) use icons in non-standard sizes c) use icons with the old GNOME look Now here's what has to be done: - Application icon: Pan needs a new application icon "pan.[png|svg]" following tango guideliens, that is available in 16x16, 22x22, 24x24, 32x32 and scalable svg versions. Those icons need to be installed into the specific size directory in the hicolor theme, $PREFIX/share/hicolor/$SIZE/. Desktop launcher file (Icon=pan), window icon (16x16 pan icon from hicolor) and about dialog (48x48 scalable pan icon from hicolor) need updating. - Icons used in the GUI: these have to be provided at specific sizes and installed into the filesystem, too: - Toolbar icons: they have to be 24x24 pixels in size and need to be installed to $PREFIX/share/pan/24x24/ - Menu icons: they have to be 16x16 pixels in size and need to be installed to $PREFIX/share/pan/16x16/ - Finally, the "Quit" menu entry should use the application-exit Icon from gnome-icon-theme.
Needed icons: 1.) Application icon - 16x16 - 22x22 - 24x24 - 32x32 - scalable 2.) Preferences - 5 icons representing the 5 layouts 3.) Toolbar - Get headers from server Get new headers for subscribed groups Get new headers for selected groups NOTE: wouldn't it be better to merge these 3 into one button with a dropdown, something like what evolution does with it's "new" toolbar icon? - Abbreviate newsgroup names (don't think the zoom-out icon fits very good here) - Post to newsgroup (use mail-new from theme?) - followup to newsgroup (use mail-followup from theme?) - Read more Next unread article Next unread thread NOTE: again, do we need all those? - Search icon NOTE: how about using the search entry with the icon like Evolution? - Filter only "unread" Filter only "cached" Filter only "complete" Filter only "by me" Filter only "watched" NOTE: what about tuning these into a dropdown of some kind and don't use any icons? 4.) Menus - Read more (use forward icon from gnome-icon-theme?) Read back (use backward icon from gnome-icon-theme?) - Next group Next unread article Next unread thread NOTE: do these need icons? - Read group (again, better use forward icon from gnome-icon-theme?) - Get headers Get new headers in selected group Get new headers in subscribed groups - Read article Cache article - Mark as read Mark as unread - Add a scoring rule Edit artlicle's watch/ignore/score (no need for an icon IMHO) - post to newsgroup followup to newsgroup NOTE: as with the toolbar icons, I propose using mail-new and mail-followup from gnome-iocn-theme. - Supersede article (icon does not tell anything, no icon needed IMHO) 5.) Message view - Icons for messages in the following states: - read - unread - new (do we need this?) - Icon for "cached" - Icon for "flagged" (emblem-important, just like evolution uses?) - Icons for attachments NOTE: I cannot say anything about this as I don't have a binary newsgroup subscribed. There are 4 icons for this ATM, are they really all needed?
Are you volunteering to make these icons? The reason the icons haven't changed in so long is that I am no artist. :)
Created attachment 74403 [details] Mockup To make my notes a bit clearer, here's a mockup of a simplified toolbar. In addition to what I wrote in the last comment I also removed the "abbreviate newsgroups" button, because I think this action is not common enough to justify a button in the main interface, it belongs to the preferences. In this mockup you see that much of the artwork currently shipping with pan becomes obsolete (-> filter icons) while not losing any functionality. For the "Get..." and "Read..." sets of icons I would propose using one main icon for the dropdown/main action (in the mockup I kept the arrows that are currently used) and simply use the other part of the old icon (for example the letter in the "next unread message" for the entry in the dropdown, not doing a merged icon with arrow and mail for example) I think the interface is much cleaner this way and better fits other GNOME applications. Also, it would ease the creation of the new icon set. I'm not an artist myself but I can see what I can get, if you are interested in getting new artwork I'll bring this up with some guys on IRC. Would be nice to have this in before 1.0 or whatever the next big release will be.
I'm very up on the idea of Pan getting newer tango-friendly icons. I'm sure that the Gnome artists could make better icons than I did. I also like taking `abbreviate group names' out of the toolbar. Fixed in CVS. I don't like all the toolbar pulldowns. They're really just menus with icons instead of text in the mockup in comment #3... filtering and next/unread/thread are very frequently used and IMO need to be one-click rather than hidden in a dropdown. Re comment #1: no, we don't need the `read new', `filter new', etc. icons. They were a holdover from 0.14.x and hadn't been taken out yet. Fixed in CVS. I agree that Supersede is better off without an icon. Fixed in CVS. GTK_STOCK_GO_FORWARD and GTK_STOCK_GO_BACKWARD /would/ make sense for `read more' and `read less', except then they'd have a different theme than `read next thread' and `read next unread thread', and since those need to stay put in the toolbar, they need icons too...
Ok, nice to hear what direction you want Pan to go. I didn't ever use those filters, so I guess it's just me that I was under the impression that the functionality is not very common. Same for the next unread/thread stuff, but I only read a handful of groups which I can manage manually just fine, so for me it's mostly interface clutter but well... Nice to see abbreviate group names and the supersede icons go, two less to do. As a note, using the "cancel" icon for "Cancel Article" is perhaps also not what you want. Does it badly need an icon? Consider using the combined icon entry for the two search entries, it just pulls the button that is currently in front of the search entry widget as well as the "cancel" buttons into the widgets, removing 3 more unneeded buttons from the toolbar (and with it the need for new icons). Would you be fine to use themed "mail-message-new" and "mail-message-reply" icons? I also proposed "stock_mail-priority-high" icon for "flagged" but currently I cannot make out how to even display that in the GUI... is it outdated? In the end this would reduce the new icons we need to a few download-, read-, and filter- icons. Lastly, I already asked for a tangofied application icon, if we can work out a list for what other icons are needed I'm sure they will be done, too.
Another quick note: how about dropping the icon_ prefix in the actual icon names, it should be obvious enough that those are icons ;) And: would be nice to rename the icons so that they reflect the action, not describe the icons themselves (icon_bluecheck, what is it for? some kind of usage indicator? would be better to change the name to reflect that, same for icon_blue_flag and icon_x) Are icon_online, icon_x, icon_zoom_in and icon_zoom_out still used? I couldn't find them in the current version...
Charles, FYI: you dropped icon_filter_only_new.png in the latest commit. As a result, the toolbar button for that action currently has no icon. :)
Re comment #5 and comment #6: I've removed the `cancel' icon from cancel-article in cvs. It's rarely used and doesn't need a custom icon. icon_online's been removed too. icon_zoom_in and icon_zoom_out are used in pan/gui/body-pane.cc, so they need to stay. I'm surprised there's not a GTK_STOCK_ icon for these... What gtk+ widget should I use for the two search entries? AFAIK there's no way to get the search dropdown and `clear' button wedged inside a GtkEntry... flagged is currently unused. The feature was dropped in the rewrite, but it's one feature that might make it back into a future version, so I'm not going to remove that icon just yet. mail-message-reply is awkward -- I can't think of a good way to distinguish reply vs. follow-up in an icon, and the latter is more important in a newsreader, so the compromise has been that followup has the `reply' icon and reply has no icon. :)
re comment #7: I was changing the icon frilename from _new to _unread. done now. Thanks for the heads-up though. :)
Ok I also saw that icon_x is used in "header-pane.cc". Is it using for closing? GTK actually provides GTK_STOCK_ZOOM_IN and GTK_STOCK_ZOOM_OUT, is this not what you want? You could also use the new icon naming scheme, the icons are called zoom-in and zoom-out, available in gnome-icon-theme. The search widgets... I had a look myself now and noticed that it is not yet shipped with GTK itself, I halfway expected that because both Evolution and Banshee (at least the two) use such a widget, but they independently developed such a widget. So there would be the possibility of taking the widget code from Evo, creating your own or using the SexyIconEntry¹ form libsexy (perhaps bundle that with Pan?). What will the "flagged" icon be used for in the future? Ok I understand the reply problem, I always looked at "followup" as "reply (to newsgroup)". I've not really noticed the "reply" option at all =) I hope this will be enough information now to get the icons done. [1] http://www.chipx86.com/wiki/Libsexy
Regarding the reply VS followup: There's mail-reply-sender and mail-reply-all in the icon spec and both gnome icon theme and tango icon theme actually have both icons... is "followup" that different from "reply to all"? Technically yes, but in the end it comes down to the same? If this is ok you can make the toolbar buttons use mail-message-new and mail-reply-all (24x24 size) and also use these icons for the menu (in 16x16), there you can also assign the reply action to the mail-reply-sender icon.
Re comment #10: yep, we can use the gtk zoom in/out. Dunno why I didn't do that before. *shrug* Thanks very much for the libsexy link. The iconentry widget header and source file just include gtk headers, so using it in Pan only requires lifting the two source files... this is definitely something I want do to before 1.0. Regarding the other icons, be aware that Pan needs to be able to run on Windows as well as Linux, so requiring gnome themes or libraries is not the safest thing in the world...
Created attachment 74455 [details] [review] 0.116 patch Patch to use gtk theme zoom in & out in the body pane
Aah, windows compatibility... You can do what for example GAIM does, e.g. use icons from the set gnome/gtk icon theme or - if that fails - fall back to a bundled version of that image. This is also what is generally done if you like to use an icon that only ships with the newest gnome-icon-theme, but you don't want to have a hard dependency on it. Directly shipping icons from gnome-icon-theme is fine, as Pan uses the same license (GPL). I would still propose to use the icons from the theme as priority one, and fall back on the shipped copy if needed. Another thing: before doing the icons the target size should be clear, so this means Pan should use correct icons sizes (meaning 24x25 pixel for toolbars and 16x16 for menus). Because this needs changes to the icon loading code anyway (has to use different sizes vs the same 20x20 px icon now used) it would probably be the best to prepare the code to load icons from $PREFIX/share/pan/icons/hicolor/$SIZE now. To clarify: The application icon in its various sizes should go into $PREFIX/share/icons/hicolor/$SIZE While the application-specific icons should go into $PREFIX/share/pan/icons/hicolor/$SIZE meaning, $PREFIX/share/pan/icons/hicolor/16x16/* for menu icons and $PREFIX/share/pan/icons/hicolor/24x24/* for toolbar icons Internally, Pan just adds $PREFIX/share/pan/icons/ to the path where it looks for icon themes and can fetch the icons using the standard gtk icon fetch method.
I have a half-complete set of icons for menus, toolbar and message pane now but a real artist will be able to do much better icons, anyway, as long as Pan doesn't support using 16x16/24x24 icons, doing the final set is not very likely. I could provide the icons I did as a placeholder until someone comes up with something better. Besides icons, it would be nice to also use colors from the tango palette for the colors in the preferences dialog as default. I can do a patch if you point me to where those defaults are set.
Created attachment 74486 [details] [review] Tango color patch This changes the default color values in pan/gui/prefs-ui.cc pan/gui/body-pane.cc to use the tango palette, same colors gnome-terminal (HEAD) uses.
Two changes you need to make to the patch: (1) I think you need to patch header-pane.cc as well for the score colors. (2) The red background color for scores 1-4999 needs to be turquoise, not red, as per bug #360725.
looking at http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Theme_Guidelines, I guess the red replacement color should be #729fcf
Created attachment 74532 [details] tango-colors.h - use these symbolic names instead of "#rrggbb" in pan
Created attachment 74551 [details] [review] Updated tango color patch Now using the symbolic names you defined and also changing the headers pane (why are those colors defined twice?) It's still using the gtk color "black" which should be ok, if not this could also be changed to the darkest tango aluminum. I prefere black.
Tango colors, and using the gtk zoom in/out icons, committed. This is a pretty wide-reaching ticket, getting cluttered, and not all of it is going to get done before 1.0 next week. So I'm renaming this ticket "Pan 1.0 icon love" and marking it as completed -- feel free to bump the remaining issues itno a new ticket.
Ok, nice to see this in. I have asked for a set of new icons but have not heard back since... I'll open a new bug for the icons then.