Had a great meeting with the rest of the GNOME Art Team at GCDS!
Together we came up with some points on where we would like to take GNOME visually in the coming 9 months.
One of the things we all agreed on is that a new widget theme is not going to be enough to create a visually stunning desktop.
Fewer but better
At the same time as we’re introducing massive 256×256 icons for places that require 64×64 and up, we also want to take the opportunity to cut down a bit on the massive amount of icons currently used in menus. At the same time, we also want to introduce some guidelines on when to properly use them to enrich your interfaces.
The current approach is that some items have them, and some don’t, and this is because no artist had time to draw it, or because the action is too complex to convey in a small icon, or both. And hand to heart, that’s not a really good guideline.
Getting rid of things (or changing defaults for that matter) is always tricky, as the initial reaction from people used to the old behavior is that nothing of value gets added. However, we believe this is a visually more attractive default and that it will result in a cleaner and more efficient interface (and you can always change it back).
What are the exceptions?
A menu item shall have a icon if it represents a dynamic object such as a:
- Application
- File or bookmark
- Device
How do I make sure the exceptions show in the menus?
Just patch your application to use gtk-image-menu-item-set-always-show-image
Won’t this slow me down, as icons are so quick to spot?
While it’s true that the eye recognize color very quickly, having both text and image also means more information for the brain to process. It’s also worth to note that text skimming speed for adults is around 400-700 wpm.
It’s always funny how people talk about GNOME and use Mozilla Firefox as an example.
Firefox? Where?
Nice icons. Can you please point me where can I find the source of the earth icon? Feel free to email it to me if you can (dk.vali@gmail.com).
Cheers!
Bravo.
So how about the zoom +/- icons, + icons for adding things or arrows for navigating or even the star for about dialogs?
In those cases (and there are a few more) you don’t even need to read the text as it’s simple/quick to understand what it means due to the nice icon.
Unfortunately until the underlying way theming is implemented in gnome/gtk what is achievable will be very limited and won’t work particulary well with custom widgets.
I thought the meeting held at sun earlier this year to discuss reworking the theme apis to potentially use css was very promising.
This all seems to have gone by the wayside. I would have thought now with the gnome 3.0 codebase this would have been the best time to finlly sort this out.
I’ve written quite a large app that has a lot of custom widgets. It all works great until some unsuspecting user uses a different theme engine that does not handle custom widgets
very well and then throws an assertion. Sure a bug could be raised for that engine but the underlying problem is that to get MyButton widget rendering like a GtkButton is inherently a hack with assigning the GtkButton style to your own.
Heres a good debate that talks a bit about this…
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2008-October/msg00037.html
have you guys talked about getting this sorted?
Hehe… would have expected more flames here, but looks like the community has grown up a little
Further to my previous messages heres another interesting thread
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2009-July/msg00076.html
the gtk_paint_* API which he talks about effectively end up being handled internally by each engine implemention.
Good on him for giving it a go; though personally I think a complete redesign would be in order rather than trying to shoehorn in a change of functionality. Appears the poster came to that conclusion as well.
Why not port/reuse what KDE has done as they currently use a css theme engine as far as I’m aware (and its working). Makes sense to me. This way you’d bring together two camps of developers and artist and could reuse what each other did. Also gnome apps would look the same on kde and vice versa as they’d be using the same theme.
“While it’s true that the eye recognize color very quickly, having both text and image also means more information for the brain to process. It’s also worth to note that text skimming speed for adults is around 400-700 wpm. ”
That doesn’t say how long it takes to find a specifc text entry in a bunch of text entries
Also it could be much slower to read some texts within differents elements (i.e. buttons in confirmation dialog box as said here http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=557469#c41 )
Mozilla Labs have demonstrate how much color was helpful to identify elements http://labs.mozilla.com/2006/11/chromatabs/
Couldn’t this be better achieved, for the sake of transition, with a more opt-out approach? I don’t really understand how we can expect everyone to “just patch” their applications to support gtk-image-menu-item-set-always-show-image. (And on a different note, perhaps a better thing to have developers patch in would be using of gtk_action and having menu items look at the is_important property to make this decision).
The widgets that pose problems here, as I understand it, are basically stock widgets.
really good news lately.. first the nautilus-simplified
http://davidsiegel.org/nautilus-simplified/
and now buttons and menus.. great..
only thing left is a customisable toolbar for nautilus and i’m happy.
meanwhile i use “human compact theme with small icons”
http://martin.ankerl.com/2008/11/04/human-compact-themes-for-ubuntu-810/
and changed the default orange/brown to blue,
icons to “mist, and it got a bit better.
p.s: imho, there’s no perfect default settings. make it customizable so everyone change it to their liking. gnome lack customisability.
@antistress:
browser’s tabs would be part of the exception since they are dynamic objects (like files or bookmarks), and indeed every one of these has an icon (the favicon)… in fact chromatabs rely on the tab’s color, not on the color of the-icon-of-the-tab
so it could be done even with buttons/menus without icons… but i haven’t ever seen an OS doing this succesfully, it’s definitely interesting, but i doubt it could be pratical…
i like the idea of getting rids of things… i wonder if there will be some other exceptions, like close buttons (the [X] is quite easy to spot, and where the close button is a lonewolf i don’t find the icon too unbalancing) or +/- icons (they go in pairs so i find them appropriate)
[...] Según informa OSNews, una propuesta sobre eliminar los iconos en menús y botones en el escritorio ya está en marcha. El planteamiento es que tanto en los menús contextuales, como en botones de cuadros de dialo e interfaz, GNOME tiene como predeterminado un icono adjunto, el cual en su mayoría sólo ocupa espacio de más, sin contribuir a la usabilidad. [...]
There is two types of people: first better recognize information that is represented by images, second better recognize text-represented info.
(You can consult with neurophysiologists and psychologists in this problem.)
If you (developers of the Gnome) take prefer one way, you will be (sorry equitable roughness) narrow-mind developers.
I believe the better approach is to let users decide which menu items they like to see with icons. I.e. by default no or only very popular menu items (like Open/Save) has icons, but user should be able to turn on icons for other menu items he wants to highlight.
[...] [...]
[...] [...]
This is exactly what drove me away from GNOME 2.0. There’s more of a focus in GNOME development circles to remove functionality than to add to it.
I think alot the problems people have with gnome comes from confusing Ubuntu with gnome. the Nautilus gripes I read are almost all related to the Ubuntu way of setting it up. I mean on Slackware with Dropline, which use a pretty much default install of Gnome with basically no tweaks, has a very very clean and takes almost no space and looks way better than either http://davidsiegel.org/nautilus-simplified/ tweaks or the default ubuntu setup.
anon: so it won’t matter to you, since you don’t use it anyway?
More is more!
There is a serious usability issue that will be introduced by this. Currently Gnome is (maybe the only) desktop manager which is more suitable for people who have troubles reading, elderly people with limited vision and young children. At the moment Gnome has an advantage in this area. In case the Gnome team will remove all these supporting icons (not optional) then Gnome will lose this advantage.
From a usability and accessibility aspect I prefer the availability of the icons, at least optional. I agree with you that removing the old fashioned icons will improve the looks of Gnome, but a better decision would have been in creating a set of new fresh icons.
Please, the icons perform a function for a lot of people! Please don’t follow the road of mediocrity: nobody does it so why should we? Keep up with your current high standards!
Relatad to
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=557469
I have using the latest OSX Leopard interface. The text menu is extremely confusing. Are we forgetting many men relied more on image rather than text?
[...] Segundo Andreas Nilsson, um dos designers envolvidos no projeto, o resultado será um “visual mais atraente, que levará a uma interface mais limpa e eficiente”. Fãs dos íconezinhos não precisam se preocupar: uma opção nas preferências do sistema permitirá restaurar o comportamento atual. [...]
I’m with freaks: “imho, there’s no perfect default settings. make it customizable so everyone change it to their liking. gnome lack customisability”
Apologies, but I really have to shout that because it feels like gnome devs don’t give a flying toerag about what users want. There are no perfect default settings. Make it customisable so everyone can change it to their liking. Gnome lacks customisability.
I hate that gnome refuses to let me do things my way. I’d switch back to kde in a heartbeat, if they return to being usable.
if i would cut something down in that firefox menu screenshot, it would definitely be remove the keyboard shortcuts.
(i guess) many people don’t know what they mean, most people don’t care and even those who care only want to see it once or twice a year.
probably it’s best not to display it inline in the menu but rather only as a tooltip of each menu item. it would remove a lot of clutter from the menu while keeping them available.
I personally hate that some actions have icons and others do not. However I wish you had gone the other way and removed the text instead.
Humans are far better a picking shapes and colours rather than reading text plus you get the added bonus of not having to translate that into 200+ languages (except for tooltips perhaps).
The post mentions that people can speed read but you need to reduce the amount of skill people need to work with a computer.
User interfaces should be measured in terms of eye movement, how many times I have to move your eye to get to where it needs to be. Reading lines of text (menus in this case) will not help in my opinion.
An all image path is very much harder but once you are there it will be a better place.
Change your language to something foreign, preferable with a different alphabet then yours. Now try to work with Gnome just like you always do. Also, if you can make any sense of the language, change it again.
Now imagine you’re in this situation all the time.
Now I hope you get a clue why the computer should adapt to its user rather then the other way around.
Wow, comments keeps coming in about this. Meanwhile, I’ve kind of moved on to other things to work on.
Is the idea to help the teachers …?
When they say (the image of the yellow thing to open your files)
I’m not a developer, but a long-time user of GNOME (somehow I’ve always been KDE-resistant, I don’t know why, I’m not really prejudiced against KDE or something) , and I, for one, welcome our new iconless overlords. Thats is, generally it’s a good idea to cut down on the visual clutter, but still I would be even more happy to see some of the icons left — the more important/most often used ones. Actually, I think I work better with apps that (unlike the FF in the screenshot) miss some of the icons, and have an icon only for save/save as, close and open in the “File” menu, for example. Could you consider identifying a set of “basic” functions, beside the “dynamic” objects, and allowing icons for them too by default?
[...] Besides the talks and discussions (and the tripping around the island!), most of the time the GNOME Art team spent was in the hacking rooms, working on icon drawings, user interfaces mockups, new ideas for streamlining the desktop and coding the new website layout. [...]
Just turning off the icons in general is a very, very bad idea.
Ab “hb” said, it’s more easy for teachers to point out to menu entries/buttons if they have symbols, same is true for tech support.
And what about the visually impaired? You could get along with the icons quite good… but only text? Or if you work in an environment where you have to work with desktops with different languages and you can’t switch the language everytime? You could get along with the icons..
Just turning them off with the reason “..reducing visual clutter” is no good.
The whole discussion in the bugtracker of gnome seems weird to me.. it’s like a rough, unshaped idea which has been converted into real code just by chance and now some people were just caught off guard.. “…hey wait.. what? Where are my icons? There was a discussion about it? Indeed?”
[...] Linux Journal covers a recent decision to simplify menus by leaving out the icons. “According to a blog post by Andreas Nilsson of the GNOME Art Team, a new policy on icon use has been adopted for future versions. In addition to adding larger icons for certain locales, the team has decided that the default value of the gtk-menu-images property in future GNOME releases will be changed to false, eliminating most of the icons used in menus. (This would include those used to represent “Open,” “Save,” and other similar dialogues.) The team feels it will produce a “visually more attractive default and that it will result in a cleaner and more efficient interface.”” [...]
I think it it is an interesting idea to consider this. I am not sure about changing the default now, though. I somewhat share Patrick’s view here. Apart from children and the elderly, we should consider people who have to use GNOME in a language they don’t understand well. Yes, we should improve our localisation to cover more languages (trust me, I’m working on it), but I believe that for some users, the icons will be much easier to recognise than the text itself, since it means little or nothing to some users who are not familiar with English or French in which they have to use the software.
How is an application “dynamic”? It just sits there until you uninstall it. Sounds like a pretty arbitrary collection of things to leave with icons, and arbitrary usually means “wrong”.
[...] Now your icons should appear back in the menus.More about this kind of issues can be red on the followingblog.Cheers END—– [...]
Why oh why is this idiotic change made.. It makes no sense, does NOT make the menus more “clean” in any way. lets me pick my application slower since there is no icon representation anymore (system menu) it looks odd because other menu’s do have icons only the system menu seems out of place now.
Foolish idiotic lame weak decision. I can perfectly understand torvalds for calling the gnome interface designed by *****, a few years ago. Gnome just doesn’t learn from it’s gigantic big ass mistakes and just keeps on making them. The kinds of things gnome people decide make me think they are mentally insane.
I vote for a gnome fork that reverts all idiotic brain tumors like this and spatial vs browser. I would even vote for kicking spatial out all together!
Do i have something against gnome? You bet i have! It was, for the last few years, the best desktop environment because there was nothing better. KDE WAS to unstable. Now with KDE 4.3.3 it all seems to work just fine so i urge people to let gnome rot and die fast and use KDE or make a gnome fork. And the next huge mistake that is about to happen is the gnome 3.0 interface.. so much time WASTED.
GNOME, You just don’t get it! your usability SUCKS because there is none. The so called HIG document of gnome is equally worthless. Take an example of the Mac HIG. And don’t COPY it but IMPROVE it. the icon part should not be copied but improved. But again that’s probably to much to ask for mentally ill and rotten brains.
Why do i post this message on this blog?
Well, the blog owner “Andreas Nilsson” did fully agree with https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=557469 and would have even gone a bit further:
—————————————————————–
Matthew: I agree to what you’re saying, because we certainly need some sort of
guidance. Currently applications tend to have icons for everything in their
menus, except for the cases where the artist said “no, I don’t have time to
draw that”. I still have some questions though.
Does save-as that use a hard drive + arrow count as object, or does that count
as action? (I guess the latter, just want clarification)
Do you mean file like in the Open Recent menu in GIMP, or something else?
I guess what I’m asking for is examples.
Anyway, +1 from me
—————————————————————–
And your later posts in that report also show you fully agree which makes you one of those rotten brains as well.
Normally i’m hard in what i say but not as hard as in this message. I USED to be worried about the direction of gnome and USED to be willing to help gnome. Not anymore. Gnome is ill beyond recovery and can, in my opinion, only recover under a fork that has a DEMOCRACY instead of a MERITOCRACY. The gnome that i see now and the coming versions are dead for me. A gnome fork is the way to go for devs and while that is under development all the users should steer away from gnome as fast as possible and switch to KDE. Far more superior then Gnome anyway.
why: I’m sorry we made you upset with the change and if you feel this is a sign of a greater illness in the project and you feel you can accomplish greater things yourself, I encourage you to fork. It is free software after all. Good luck with the project! (I’m not sarcastic here, I mean it)
And next time, try to stay away from insults like telling me I have a rotten brain or try to imply that I have the mindset of a terrible regime. That kind of arguments seldom helps moving the discussion forward.
Hugs from Sweden.
Hmm, “why” did somewhat tell how i think about it. I agree with you “why” although your tone could be a little less aggressive.
I also think that gnome made just a bit to much strange new defaults and gnome certainly doesn’t listen to user feedback. I even started (unintended) a flamewar about the spatial vs browser mode and it was more then obvious that browser mode is what most users want yet gnome persists on forcing spatial mode.. I know it can be changed!
Sad but true. A gnome fork that cleans up the current default setting mess (among things) would certainly get my support.
@Nilsson what was the motivation for accepting this new default? since it “seems” most users dislike it.
Quote: “According to a blog post by Andreas Nilsson of the GNOME Art Team,… … The team feels it will produce a “visually more attractive default and that it will result in a cleaner and more efficient interface.”
That’s a pure bullshit, guys! I probably may understand some people don’t like icons in menus and buttons, but hey, what’s the matter, don’t you see that almost 95% of users LIKE the icons? They are used to it and that’s really cool to have nice coloured live menus instead of dumb, boring and dry text-based only ones.
Default setting MUST enable icons, as well as browser mode for Nautilus! That is what most users need.
Making them disabled by default is killing the Gnome. That has been a really stupid decision not only from my own perspective, but also from the perspective of all colleagues and the friends of mine!
Please, open your eyes, guys! People want sexy UI.
It should not necessarily be a “festival of colours” (some people like emotions, some people don’t), but it must be a picture anyway – not a lonely text. That’s for sure.
I bet you – reconsider! Long live the GNOME!