Hi,

I haven't seen them in action yet (just saw the commit) but what concerns me is that the battery icon is much less precise now.

Back in Plasma 4.10 and earlier, before my re-write, there used to be an overlay you could enable which showed the battery percentage superimposed ontop of the icon. That thing was ugly but useful, because the battery icon was not very descriptive. So in 4.11 I made the icon more precise by visualizing 10% steps instead of just 20%. This was carried over to the awesome circular battery icon.

However, the new icon again uses just 5 blobs to represent 100%, 80%, 60%, 40%, and 20% (in red, I should probably enable the theme to provide a 0% graphic, so we can have that red too). This is much less precise than the circle or the 4.11+ behavior.

In fact, I was thinking about just removing the fallback in 5.0 but left it in because we apparently have theme compatibility with 4:

Code: Select all

 function fillElement(p) {
        // We switched from having steps of 20 for the battery percentage to a more accurate
        // step of 10. This means we break other and older themes.
        // If the Fill10 element is not found, it is likely that the theme doesn't support
        // that and we use the older method of obtaining the fill element.
        if (!svg.hasElement("Fill10")) {
            print("No Fill10 element found in your theme's battery.svg - Using legacy 20% steps for battery icon");

Hi,

I just updated Plasma icons today and to be honest, I like the previous ones more (talking about network icons). The new ethernet icon looks like a screen to me, it doesn't look like it has something to do with ethernet. Also new wireless icon looks boring compared to the previous one. Is there any plan to continue in improving of those icons? Or any chance to get some of them back? I don't want to be mean, I really appreciate what are you doing, it's just that when I updated to previous set of icons I was really suprised and happy, but now it has opposite effect.

Edit: On the other hand, I like the red icons, when you have wifi/3g/flight mode turned off.

Fwiw, I think ethernet connections could just be the ethernet cable, something similar to (from [1]) or (from [2])


[1] http://thenounproject.com/term/ethernet/10271/
[2] http://landsharkit.co.za/network-installations

Probably too filigree for small scales (try downscaling and see what's left)
The RJ-45 "logo" (frontal shape) is likely too abstract (esp. w/o context)

-> What's wrong with the 3 wired boxes?

Thanks for everyone's patience on this.

For the battery icon, there's probably still some work to do. Sorry if it (and other icons) don't satisfy everyone yet.

As I'm working to get these icon sizes consistent, for the 22x22 icons, the visible portions of the icons are about 16px high, just like in the main breeze icon theme. So it's been a little challenging translating some SNI-unique icon designs down to that scale while trying to avoid fuzziness and maintain the stroke balance. For the latter, horizontal and vertical lines and edges aligned with the pixel grid will be sharp while slanted or curved lines will be slightly fuzzy and appear slightly thicker due to antialiasing effects. It isn't possible to completely avoid one or the other in every icon design, so as along as the there's an overall balance within and between icons then things don't stand out too much. For the battery icon, the 5.0 circle version - which we may still end up going back to - was almost entirely made up of curved or slanted lines. On it's own it looks great. Next to other icons in the systray it sort of looked a little fuzzy. Paired with the concerns about changing metaphors I thought I'd take a stab at a more traditional looking battery icon. (I actually quite like the circle icon myself.) Whatever we end up with there'll likely need to be tradeoffs one way or another. The same goes for the network icons. We'll see how it goes over the next day or two.

As a reminder if you're not using a build from the last few days with the fix for the battery monitor and network icons, you'll likely see inconsistent SNI/systray icons sizes (and accompanying fuzziness).

Thanks again for your patience with me.

Well - look at it this way everyone. At a certain point we will need to let go for a version.

When the last icons came there was a river of criticism which Andrew have worked hard to answer without just going with the old Oxygen icons (which was often suggested - and if I remember Nuno's anecdotes he was often suggested he shouldn't change icons either...).
I don't want people to stop talking about icon work - BUT let this sit for a little while, lets see if they grow on you and for next release we can revisit the subject and check it through again. I'm not trying to snub anyone here or try to shut you guys up - just that at this point its a tad late for a redesign and we can't just mix and match.
Lets instead focus on getting these icons aligned and make sure there is no blurryness - release them and see how we feel a bit later. We wont leave the subject - just let it stew a while and go from there. Trying to rework them daily isn't a good way for sanity at this point.

I'm obviously in favour for the new icons BUT right now its an issue of letting the main designer of the icons rest for a second or two instead of having to rework them over and over. Everyone wont like the new battery icon maybe, everyone wont like the connection icon but we can't change them forever and getting everyone to agree on one thing like this is sadly impossible within a normal timeframe.

Is that ok? To just try to get the icons we got now to get a nice alignment etc - and then revisit the subject at a later date?

I absolutely agree, not everyone will be pleased in the end anyway.

However, I would just like to point one last thing - about the wired network icon - it /does/ look a bit like a screen. Now the problem here is that there are/might be some screen controlling applets (I think kscreen has/used to have something like that) and the icon for that I would guess would be a screen of some kind and this could get confusing. Just something to keep in mind.

Other than that, actually very damn good job.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQRv0qM_5rQ)

Cheers!

Just thought I'd chime in here and say that I'm happy with the icons no matter what they end up like. I like the fact there's controversy over the icons because it shows there's a bit of personality in it, the same personality that you can see imprinted in a lot of work that's come out of this forum. Are we aiming for perfection with this? Or should the message be, 'Hey, this is what we've come up with, but we know that you can, and should, come up with something better.'?

I think the message should be: Hey this is the current way it is - come on in and help!

(Ok I know that clashes a little with my "taking off my glasses and trying to look stern" post above (I don't have glasses and trying to look stern only makes me look constipated) but essentially thats about it. I really believe that the more the better ... its just sometimes we need to let a few things slip for now and return later on when there is a better shot at it. Nothing is forgotten here btw just moved a little bit down the working line. )

Boring admin stuff:

Icons in plasma-framework, will be tagged on the 4th October from master as part of the frameworks release.
Icons in the breeze folder will be tagged on the 10th October from the Plasma/5.1 branch.

Normally (in the KDE 4.x days) we have an artwork freeze before a release. We forgot to put one in 5.1 (my fault). I have added one for 5.2 and future releases. See https://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma_5 .

Just saw the new icons for the system tray, the new ones talked about above that hit git a day ago. My immediate first impressions are that they are very nice looking, but the wired connect looks like a monitor. I like the usb icon better, the klipper icon is okay (I liked the clipboard one more myself), and the battery is good looking (I liked the circle but the new icon is very well done and I'm not heart broken about the change). The network manager one look like a monitor, and the airplane icon in the network manager is too pointy, it sticks out from the out subtle curves.