On 14.12.2011 14:58, Rob Weir wrote:
On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 3:00 AM, Andrea Pescetti
<pesce...@openoffice.org> wrote:
On 14/12/2011 Rob Weir wrote:
On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 7:38 PM, Andrea Pescetti
But can someone explain why the icons
were changed in the first place? Surely, someone had an argument for
this at the time?
In the wiki page Pedro linked there's a further link to the official
explanation page, now dead but still on archive.org at
http://web.archive.org/web/20091004033006/http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/unified_odf_icons
Comments are worth reading too, but the ideas were: making unified ODF icons
as Herbert wrote (good, but hasn't happened) and get rid of the curve in the
old icons (you can still find them at
http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/3623/ooomedie.png ) which supposedly was an S
and meant Sun; honestly, users couldn't care less about the S.
You mention flamewars. That suggests there were two points of view.
It is hard to have a flamewar where eveyone agrees. ;-)
It was mostly Oracle vs rest-of-the-world (even though probably a large
percentage of users didn't care much). Especially irritating to critics was
seeing that the redesign effort
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/ODF_icons_i-team (this is the
redesign effort started AFTER complaints were made, so the redesign of the
new icons) started with the premise that colors wouldn't come back and tried
variants on the monochrome design, thus persisting in a widely criticized
attitude. It was, in a way, a clear fracture between Oracle and the
community, even if one sees it from a non-political point of view.
OK. Thanks for the background.
One thought is to avoid this be an either/or type decision where there
are winners and losers. Obviously end-users care about this, but not
everyone is going to agree. But why can't this be something that a
user can easily change?
So instead of fighting for control of the default icon set, think
about making this flexible. What if AOO was "skinable" via
extensions?
We did something similar to Symphony with our "Rebranding Plugin":
http://www-03.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony/plugin.nsf/web_DisplayPlugin?openform&unid=22E742258B098B2A852577C30027A24D&category=Miscellaneous&form=home
This allowed not only changing the UI, but also the splash screen,
even the name of the application. If you wanted to call it
"AndreOffice" and put your photo in the splash screen, then you could
do that without writing any code!
Finally, I get my own office!
But seriously, I like the idea of an easily themable office. That would
make even accessibility easier to implement (at the moment we have code
repeated over and over again that checks whether to use high contrast
icons and then installs them)
To some extent we are already themable: look at
Tools->Options->OpenOffice.org->View; in the User Interface section one
can change icon style.
-Andre
-Rob
Regards,
Andrea.
