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Trever Fischer is a junior at The University of Akron
with a strong enthusiasm towards coding, writing, photography, and above all: oranges.
This is his site. Specifically, this is his "About" box. He is also a full-time hacker who tinkers with Amarok, Plasma, various KDE bits, and PHP.
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Call for icons
For the 4.4 release, my local ACM chapter had a small release event where I demoed all the neat new features. One question that came up was “Why are all the control panel pages so…disorganized?”
I’ve wanted to work on that since it seemed like it’d be really simple and quick to do. However for the past few weeks, I’ve been stuck working with an iRobot Create for my robotics class. [plug] My team and I have been using the libirobot library I started writing a long while ago to get our two projects done.[/plug] Since the library is completely unfinished and experimental, it took up all of my KDE hacking time. D’oh.
But after the two projects were done, I suddenly found myself with free time again. So instead of working on getting webcam support into phonon like I should’ve been doing, I fiddled around with the organization. (Here’s a WIP-quality screenshot too)
I asked a few folks who thought it was disorganized, and they seem to like the new ordering. The only problem though, is that we need a new icon for the new ‘input hardware’ category. I created a bug report, to which pinheiro replied:
ok valid bug, there is a bunch of icons in kcm that could be better a comprehensive list of those and also proposals to make them better would be fantastic.
pinheiro on bug 231270
I’m going to go through them this weekend with some other campus KDE users and a new design major friend I recently met (who has never used or seen KDE before) and look at what needs improvement.
’till then, if you’ve got a problem or suggestion for some icons, go say something in that bug.
7 Responses to “Call for icons”
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every so many months someone wants to re-organize the panels. it’s an exercise in shuffling deckchairs on the titanic: they may look subjectively nicer when you’re done but it’s a moot point.
what matter is that people have learned where things are and every time we move them around we destroy that knowledge.
moreover, adding a 5th row is going to make this window not fit on many screens. (and why is “remote controls” not with hardware?)
the assumption that configuring the kamera ioslave and automount is common enough to warrant being on the first page is also questionable.
it’s laudable to work on improving system settings. but if things do get moved around, let’s do it well, let’s do it based on actual and _extensive_ usability testing and let’s address some of the _core_ issues rather than shuffling the surface bits.
that means looking at it from “afar”: note how many of the (verticaly stacked) categories have few items in them. note how poorly the configuration items in the individual kcm’s are laid out.
yes, that’s a bigger job. but it’s the only one worth doing. moving the icons around again so people have to re-learn where things are isn’t.
getting improved icons is a good thing, regardless of what else happens, of course :)
Thats the plan. I hope to do more than just shuffle things around and hope for the best. But this is a start, since it seems to be that ‘computer administration’ is just a nasty dumping ground for everything. It needs to go away.
And to everyone else, the reason remotes isn’t in the same category as other hardware is because it wasn’t a mockup screenshot, I just edited the .desktop files and took a quick capture.
I don’t really see a difference between computer administration and hardware.
Why for example is remote control different from input devices.
Hi Trever, this looks like an improvement. But what I do not understand is why some items are in Administration (remote control, multimedia and sound) or why printer and K3b/DVD configs are missing. I see a rather general problem with a system settings based on categories. I tried thinking about better categories too: http://forum.kde.org/brainstorm.php#idea40210_page1
The problem is that is has difficulties to cope with the development of KDE and sorting into categories in general. There are alway items that do not fit at all or would belong in more than one category. That is why I suggest to implement a system settings based on tagging of the modules, mayy be the individual settings, so that finding of the right setting could be made easier:
http://forum.kde.org/brainstorm.php#idea40200_page1
I can not wait that someone fix the “Keyboard and mouse” icon and “Input Actions” because I always mistake both. And the keyboard and mouse does not have the mouse so it is easy to miss.
Icons are the least of problems in KDE’s configuration dialogs. The real issue is that the settings are totally mixed and messed up and spread across multiple locations. It is so bad I don’t even know where to start with examples.
Well, one example: Look and Feel configuration contains Font settings but not the window animation settings, which is clearly a look and feel element too but located somewhere else. Same thing goes for window corners, which can be configured in KWin once and in the screensaver settings a second time, etc etc etc.
This area needs to be seriously cleaned out and only then please put some time into verifying all the icons are nice (for those things that remain).
See: http://www.ubuntu.sun.ac.za/wiki/index.php/Desktop for user centric admin panel.