Davyd (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} davyd) wrote,@ 2006-02-05 16:00:00 |
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I Like Your Old Stuff Better Than Your New Stuff
I hate to seem like I'm harping on about this topic again, but I wish I knew what was going on here.
This rant is about the loss of contexual information in the icons we use from day to day in the desktop. Here are two examples:
Now, it may not seem so at first, but an amazing amount of contexual information has now been lost in both of these dialogs. In the first dialog there is no longer any indication anywhere in the desktop as to what protocol you are using for a connection. While my mum may not care what protocol she is using, there are a class of people who do. They may have forgotten what protocol they're using to access some files on a webserver (is it ssh, dav, ftp?), because certain protocols may be too insecure to use over certain networks, only work on certain sides of a firewall or display different contents based on what network you're on.
In the second dialog, the graphical connection between file type and icon have gone. In the original icons it was easy to glean both: that the things you were looking at were images; and what type of images they were. This is no longer possible. You may have recalled that the image you are looking for was a JPEG and have some spatial awareness of where it was in the directory. Instantly your eyes will snap to any JPEG images so that you can read their file names. That is now gone. Additionally, the quick reference for the file type (there may be 100 reasons that you want to know this) has been removed. You still know that it is an image, but not what kind of image. This isn't the only example of loss of icon context, our rich icon library seems to have been completely depopulated.
To be perfectly honest, I am a little embarrased with what I've been seeing in the latest GNOME betas. I was really, really happy with GNOME 2.12, I loved showing off screenshots of its hotness. I'm currently too embarrassed to write a review of the GNOME 2.13 beta. Some things look really good, but some things are looking really ugly. I really hope we don't release like this.
I hate to seem like I'm harping on about this topic again, but I wish I knew what was going on here.
This rant is about the loss of contexual information in the icons we use from day to day in the desktop. Here are two examples:
Now, it may not seem so at first, but an amazing amount of contexual information has now been lost in both of these dialogs. In the first dialog there is no longer any indication anywhere in the desktop as to what protocol you are using for a connection. While my mum may not care what protocol she is using, there are a class of people who do. They may have forgotten what protocol they're using to access some files on a webserver (is it ssh, dav, ftp?), because certain protocols may be too insecure to use over certain networks, only work on certain sides of a firewall or display different contents based on what network you're on.
In the second dialog, the graphical connection between file type and icon have gone. In the original icons it was easy to glean both: that the things you were looking at were images; and what type of images they were. This is no longer possible. You may have recalled that the image you are looking for was a JPEG and have some spatial awareness of where it was in the directory. Instantly your eyes will snap to any JPEG images so that you can read their file names. That is now gone. Additionally, the quick reference for the file type (there may be 100 reasons that you want to know this) has been removed. You still know that it is an image, but not what kind of image. This isn't the only example of loss of icon context, our rich icon library seems to have been completely depopulated.
To be perfectly honest, I am a little embarrased with what I've been seeing in the latest GNOME betas. I was really, really happy with GNOME 2.12, I loved showing off screenshots of its hotness. I'm currently too embarrassed to write a review of the GNOME 2.13 beta. Some things look really good, but some things are looking really ugly. I really hope we don't release like this.
