[Qgis-developer] Cast your vote: Default icon theme for QGIS 2.0

[Robert Szczepanek]

Hi,

On 26.07.2012 20:55, Tim Sutton wrote:
> Hi
>
> On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 7:27 PM, Larry Shaffer <larrys at dakotacarto.com> wrote:
>> Hi Robert,
>>
> The shadows look quite nice for me. The larger issue I have is that
> many of the icons are just hard to recognise when you see them lined
> up side by side.

Could you please point them out. I see this problem with "open 
PostGIS/SpatiaLite/MSSQL layer", but we can solve it using colours.

>> Also, there has been discussion on condensing some icon groups down to
>> one entry icon that has a popup menu (Qt's InstantPopup or
>> MenuButtonPopup [1]). A few toolbar icons use this now, e.g. Feature
>> Selection tool. Using that technique and condensing functionality into
>> better dialogs (see Nathan's import dialog [2]) will go a long way
>> towards thinning the current icon-heavy look.
>>
>> When considering condensing such items care has to be taken not to
>> introduce extra clicks for tools that should be only one click away,
>> e.g. Pan and Zoom tools. Though group entry icons are very similar to
>> menubar menus at that point, they have the added advantages of being
>> language-agnostic and visible when users switch to full screen mode,
>> which usually hides the menubar.
>
> My argument against these is that they defeat the purpose of icons
> (making functionality available with single click). It takes two
> clicks to invoke an action from a menu so in my mind the use case for
> popup tool buttons should be restricted to where those tools need to
> indicate a toggled state (like the map tools). A secondary
> consideration is that when I give training courses the selection popup
> toolbutton is something that novice users struggle with and it is not
> very discoverable. Your points for it are interesting, though I
> suspect that the number of people running qgis fullscreen is extremely
> small.

I agree with Tim. We should avoid grouping icons, unless there is very 
high usage frequency ratio (one icon used much, much often than the 
other). Good example is labelling toolbar. It should be grouped and 
included in some other toolbar. This optimization must be focused on 
beginners, as experienced users probably use more keyboard shortcuts.

regards,
Robert

>
> Regards
>
> Tim
>
>>
>> So, there may need to be some new icons made that represent tool
>> groups, though some discussion on condensing tools has to happen
>> first.
>>
>> [0] http://www.easypolls.net/poll.html?p=4ffb5dfae4b08ad9dfac3f70
>> [1] ToolButtonPopupMode: http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.7/qtoolbutton.html
>> [2] http://osgeo-org.1560.n6.nabble.com/Cast-your-vote-Default-icon-theme-for-QGIS-2-0-tp4987108p4987577.html
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Larry Shaffer
>> Dakota Cartography
>> Black Hills, South Dakota