We have come up with what we believe could very well be the new blue for the Amarok Icon set. We need some of the developers and anyone else who is interested to install these and test them out. There is nothing more effective than a real world trial.

We have only included the icons for the player buttons. We did it this way because the player buttons are very prominent.

The NewBlue.tar.bz2 contains two folders named 22 and 32. Feel free to download it.

Then following these instructions.
How to install:
Completely quit Amarok
Extract the NewBlue.tar.bz2.
Launch a sudo/root session of your file browser.
Then go to the amarok/icons/hicolor folder. The location of the amarok folder may vary from distro to distro.
You will see a bunch of numbered folders. Look for the 22 and 32 folders.
Back up all of the following files in both folders. 
    amarok_back.png
    amarok_fastforward.png
    amarok_next.png
    amarok_pause.png
    amarok_pause.png
    amarok_play.png
    amarok_rewind.png
    amarok_stop.png
The fastest way to do this is by adding .bak after the .png like this amarok_fastforward.png.bak
Once you have backed up all of the files. Copy the files from the NewBlue 22 and 32 folders into the hicolor 22 and 32 folder.
Now start amarok.

The purpose of this trial is to allow the Amarok developers to decide if this will be acceptable as the "new blue." We are primarily looking for feedback on the color. Any discussion out side of this parameter will be considered off topic.   

We have attached three files to serve as a visual aid for the comparison between theOriginalBlue, NewBlue, and CurrentBlue.
Note: In order to see these attachments you need to be logged in.

I like this a lot, looks nice. Just one remark that might be important:

Before we started having the current shade of blue for the icons, we were using a different shade, similar to the one you suggested. It looked great, but there were problems with the contrast: On high resolution displays the icons became very hard to distinguish. So, that's why ended up with the current (kinda ugly) shade of blue, because it provided better contrast.

Now, I don't know if these new icons suffer from this problem. Just wanted to bring this experience into the discussion


Here you can see an image of these early icons:

http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/80- ... work!.html

Nice icons. Yes, the current ones are pretty ugly (I doubt anyone actually use those... am I wrong?).
However, wouldn't it be better to drop those "round borders"? When the icons are 16x16 (for example when you right click the system tray icon) it could be hard to distinguish the different actions.

hans chen wrote:Nice icons. Yes, the current ones are pretty ugly (I doubt anyone actually use those... am I wrong?).
However, wouldn't it be better to drop those "round borders"? When the icons are 16x16 (for example when you right click the system tray icon) it could be hard to distinguish the different actions.

From the original post.
We are primarily looking for feedback on the color. Any discussion out side of this parameter will be considered off topic. 

Mark Kretschmann wrote:I like this a lot, looks nice. Just one remark that might be important:

Before we started having the current shade of blue for the icons, we were using a different shade, similar to the one you suggested. It looked great, but there were problems with the contrast: On high resolution displays the icons became very hard to distinguish. So, that's why ended up with the current (kinda ugly) shade of blue, because it provided better contrast.

Now, I don't know if these new icons suffer from this problem. Just wanted to bring this experience into the discussion


Here you can see an image of these early icons:

http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/80- ... work!.html

I am really glad that you brought up this point. For this trial what we really need are for people who are using high resolution displays to test the "New Blue" icons.

I  will also be creating a visual comparison between the original, current and "new blue in the original post."

We also have another blue that is a compromise between the current blue and the new blue. We just happened to have really liked the lighter shade of blue better. Plus we hope that the differences between the original and New Blue would resolve the contrast issue.

I am not sure what a high resultion display is.
I have a laptop 15" LCD here with 1600x1200 and I think the color is fine and I can easily distinguish the icons.
Great work!

marcel wrote:I am not sure what a high resultion display is.
I have a laptop 15" LCD here with 1600x1200 and I think the color is fine and I can easily distinguish the icons.
Great work!

This is great news!
This also better defines exactly what we need from people participating in this trial.
Thank you!

If future replies could include the following information that would be great.
Monitor type = LCD or CRT
Screen Resolution =
I can easily distinguish the icons =

getting a Asus 22" screen with a 1600X1050 resolution on Friday ..will post soon and let you know

on my 19"  :

Monitor type = CRT
Screen Resolution =1152X864
I can easily distinguish the icons =YES


Zeltak

An image is worth more than a thousand words...

Monitor type = CRT 17"
Screen Resolution =1024x768
I can easily distinguish the icons = well, yes

theobroma loves the B52's.  You earned some points there. 

Yes, the New Blue Icons are clearly the best option.

They look great on my LCD 12.1" X60s Thinkpad at 1024x768.

The current blue icons are perceived ugly because the blue is a very pure and saturated spectral blue which doesn't go well with the rest of the desktop (although the shapes aren't too bad).

I'm looking forward to seeing the New Blue Icons in the next version of Amarok.

Torsten