[OpenLayers-Users] Intuitive and good looking icons

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 02:26:02AM +0800, Jani Patokallio wrote:
> Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> > If you want to propose changes, I recommend patches be attached to a
> > ticket, with suggestions. I'm not against changing what we have, I'm
> > simply stating that I like them, and I think that anyone who says that
> > they are obviously wrong -- as you are doing, again -- is missing the
> > point.
> >   
> Design is debatable, lack of usability is not -- I dare you, go ahead,
> take *anybody* unfamiliar with OL and ask them to figure out what the
> three identical [+] icons mean or how the magnifying glass with the
> red box works.  

I don't know what magnifying glass with red box you're talking about, so
I can't comment on that. When I look at
http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/lite.html , I see one "+", not three,
and it's reasonably understandable how it works, in my opinion, though
I'll admit the globe icon isn't the prettiest thing in the world. 

> Dismissing usability concerns as "personal
> preferences" is facile: it's not a personal preference if our users
> _don't understand how to use the map_, and OpenLayers should damn well
> be usable out of the box.

I disagree with this last statement. OpenLayers is not designed to be
usable 'out of the box'. It is a library designed to help you build
applications, so it's your job as an OpenLayers user to build the box.
OpenLayers doesn't do that for you. "Out of the box", OpenLayers
provides the link above -- and the link above has none of the things
you've described. (Minus lack of tooltips, but I don't think that
they're particularly neccesary on the buttons enabled by default.)

Am I being intentionally limiting here? Yes, I am. There's a couple
reasons for that.

 1. I don't respond well to people yelling about anything, and
    right now, your approach comes off as yelling, whether that's
    intentional or not. (This is me personally, but I think it extends
    to most developers; attitude is everything when communicating with
    a mailing list.)
 
 2. I strongly believe that the fixes for the issues you describe *are
    not OpenLayers library fixes* primarily. Instead, they are
    improvements to documentation and to the applications which use the
    library. The things that you get when you don't configure *anything*
    are demonstrated in lite.html -- anything else is configured by the
    application developer. We provide some tools to make it easier, but
    if you don't like it -- you can change them!

> Incidentally, tooltips for controls seem to have been implemented since
> 2.6 (Trac #822), but apparently no default values are defined and you
> need to hand-hack the Javascript to add your own.  Is there any reason
> *not* to enable tooltips by default, especially now that OpenLayers
> supports localization?  If not, I'll write the patch myself.

No reason, no.

Best Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta