Recently I saw a few people commenting along of ‘GNOME 3 icons being crap’ so I investigated what the actual core of the issue might be. When dissing the years of work that went into creating the system theme and pushing app icons upstream, most of the commenters seem to actually have a problem with the folder icon.

The GNOME folder is a result of using the actual beige color that is both the real world folder material, and the legacy of Tuomas’ GNOME 1 folder. Easy things are hard so it’s a result of endless iteration with my soul mate, Lapo Calamandrei, to get the icon look great at the small sizes, but also to have the icon snap to the render grid well for the common high res sizes (64, 96, 128, 256). It repeats well in a grid. I feel the voices disliking the beige folder are the same voices disliking the grey folder in the original Tango set. We ended up listening to those folks and changed it to blue, but I ended up regretting the decision.

The blue folder grabbed way too much attention for something that’s used when browsing for the actual content. While a lot of effort went into making the folder, we don’t actually expose it all too much. Exposing the directory structure is the pre-GNOME 3 world. What we focus on now are the applications.

Which is actually the other issue people seem to attribute to “GNOME sucking”. It is true that the current reality of opening up the overview is quite different to the ideal mockup.

Many apps ship with very sub par application icons. One of the solution to this problem is to “take over” the theming of Application icons. We have been there in the past and just like taking over app distribution by distro packaging, there is a lot to lose when you centralize something that should really be left to the application authors. The app icon is the app’s identity. Sure it’s more difficult to convince the upstream to take your work despite it not being created by an algorithm, but taking away a project’s identity in the name of policing the aesthetics of the overview is not the right approach. We toyed with the idea of forming a blacklist and buttonizing some icons in prior to the 3.0 release, but came to the conclusion we should help app authors with guidelines and design help instead. For the life of me, can’t find this on the wiki anymore.
We’ve been successful in pushing app icons upstream for projects such as Inkscape, GIMP, Blender, Transmission and helped other projects such as Font Forge to create a multi-resolution icon adhering to the Tango guidelines. Another aspect of taking over all app icons by overriding them with an all-encompassing theme seems to be “consistency”. The word is used in a sense that the icons share a common shape and perspective. Now while that makes them form a really nice grid, it goes against the most useful attribute of a good icon — being distinguishable form the rest. I love the challenge of being restricted to a button shape and I’ve certainly drooled over some of the smart icons fitting into a rectangle pill, but a unique silhouette is really helping in identifying the app in the grid.

We do have a wider choice for the perspective in the Tango guidelines. Experience has showed us some objects simply can’t be made immediately distinguishable facing straight, so the on the table perspective is used sometimes. But that doesn’t suddenly make the set inconsistent.

To make myself clear, the icons aren’t perfect. We have a lot of issues to fix, but I felt I needed to express my stance on the repeating comments.

• Greyness of GNOME icons.
• Tile fit.

As Barbara has been rocking the symbolic world, she was interested in the fullcolor Tango icons as well. We did a live Hangout session together with Garrett which we didn’t advertize anywhere, and yet some 20 people joined in. Now it’s up on the GNOME 3 Design youtube channel for your viewing pleasure.

Pssst! Looking for icons to design?

In the next installment of teh Blender for Motion Design series, we look at constraints and shape keys. Download the project file if you want to continue with the dissection yourself.

Set up your screen for animation, learn how to export portions of static mockups, learn keyframing, dope sheet and graph editor. Grab the finished scene here.

Part 5 — Animation

A while ago I was shocked to see Allan create a transition design using manual frame by frame animation and decided to shed some light at how I do the motion graphics you can see in the previous few posts in the hope of more people picking up the tool and investigating alternate paths.

Please do understand that this is not a general introduction to Blender and that there is great amount of books, documentation on the web and even youtube screencasts. This series only looks at the bare essentials to be able to create these 2D transitions and will hopefully spark interest in learning more of the amazing tool that is Blender. Here’s a few links I recommend if you need a more in depth look:

• Blender: Noob to Pro
• Johnny Blender Intro
• Blender Google Books

I have my doubts about completing the series so any cheering counts if you actually enjoy this one and would like to see it come to an end. If you don’t want to miss a part, feel free to subscribe to the channel.

Palm Prē illustration based on the work of Andreas Nilsson.

I’m actually so confident I’ll be home on WebOS that I already sold my iphone this time.

As of today is the day you can enjoy a fresh new release of openSUSE, the mothership of projects like Banshee, Evolution, F-Spot or Kiwi.

While 11.2 defaults to KDE, we have a solid GNOME release as well. GNOME ships on both the DVD and a separate LiveCD. Now you can actually put the ISO on a USB stick or an SD card and boot from that.

Styling of 11.2 may be a bit different to what you’d expect from SUSE and is a bit of a return to the golden Ximian days. Darker, less saturated shades of the background let your content get all the attention. It’s still green though

Gilouche has been the openSUSE theme for a while now and 11.2 introduces a new default, Sonar. Sonar is a metatheme consisting of window manager decorations and a widget theme. Unfortunately a key element didn’t make it in time — the icon theme. By default you still get the familiar Gilouche folders. You can, however, install the Sonar icon theme from Factory. It’s also the first time we’re using the openSUSE font, 5th Leg, for window titles. 5th Leg is the result of openSUSE’s Hackweek and have to express my gratitude to Novell for this event yet again.

    

SUSE Moblin

Sonar isn’t the only new theme addition though. Building on top of some great design coming from the openedHand/Intel team working on Moblin I’ve experimented with a simple glyph style (although slightly less minimalistic) and an easier workflow for creating such an icon theme. While the font approach ended up as a failure, the SUSE Edition of Moblin is now shipping a theme based on the foundation of the hackweek experiment.

Unfortunately the theme isn’t independent of the widget and WM theme color yet (if any hacker is interested in figuring out how to best recolor the SVG glyphs based on gtk colors, please step forward . The good news is that you can try the complete package on the desktop even if it was designed for a small netbook screen (with a clumsy touchpad). It works quite well if you have enough screen estate.

You can grab the latest and greatest moblin-cursor-theme, moblin-icon-theme and moblin-gtk-engine from my personal repo.

Go ahead, try openSUSE 11.2. We love GNOME too!

One of the skills I most lack (ok there’s quite a list) is drawing/sketching. I usually just do a very rough one or avoid it completely so there’s little to no chance of improving. So I’ve started a project to draw something every day for a whole month. I will probably need to make it whole year to see any improvement though. But then again I know I can barely make it through the month. And yes, part of the project is public humiliation.

I was thinking to give myself a fixed time limit for these, but I’ll leave that for when I have at least a bit of confidence. And since I’ve published it here, I will look even more embarrassed when I skip a day.

Failure IS an option for hackweek . While things looked fairly optimistic on the icon theme/font front, the actual results don’t look so good.

While the chopping script is working fairly well, it’s hardly elegant and really suffers from insanely slow startup time of Inkscape. The “crop” is done thanks to Inkscape’s verbs and requires Inkscape to be called once per icon. Even worse, to clean it up and remove some cruft for the Fontforge import, it needs to be called once again.

Ted mentioned a GSoC project to provide a better interface for external scripting (using dbus), but I haven’t had time to look into it yet. By the time I’ll look at this again, it’s going to be merged in, surely .

Fontforge’ interface couldn’t be in a bigger contrast in terms of speed. Importing SVGs as glyphs and generating a truetype font out of the template is faster than you can release the return key. Sadly FontForge doesn’t expect the font height to be 24pt and all the circles don’t end up as such after the import. I haven’t been able to figure out how to either scale the SVGs up to 1000px in Inkscape or transform after the import in FontForge.

So this has been a rather kind failure. One that doesn’t leave me feeling like I wasted my time.

CSS theme engine

I had an old mockup for a CSS theme that now felt too bubble gummy. After dealing with the hyper-realistic renderings of gnome-icon-theme high res, I enjoy the minimalism of Moblin.

Sadly time has run out as I’ve had some outstanding tasks I needed to handle. Hopefully I can get back to this. The engine just manages to avoid me.

One of the greatest things about openSUSE is happening again this week. Hackweek time seems to also be the only time I have something worthwhile to put on my blog.

I don’t have a very focused plan for this year, but I’d like to investigate the following:

• Stencil icon workflow.

  I’d like to have a single SVG canvas with all my icons and generate an SVG-only icon theme. Ted Gould showed me his nifty script at GCDS that used Inkscape‘s verbs to ‘chop up’ an SVG into individual SVG files, so that part I already know is feasible.

  The untouched ground is importing those SVGs into a FontForge project file to generate a font out of the theme as well.

• CSS gtk+ theme. Robert Staudinger has been working on a gtk+ theme engine that allows a theme creator to use CSS-like language to draw stuff (as opposed to talking to a developer to draw stuff). The project has been on my radar forever and I’ve never really sat down and gotten my hands dirty. Must fix!

Wish me luck!