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Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:49:04 +0100
From: Andre Fischer <af@a-w-f.de>
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To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: old colored vs new monochrome icons
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On 14.12.2011 14:58, Rob Weir wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 3:00 AM, Andrea Pescetti
> <pescetti@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.