GNOME To Drop Icons in Buttons, Menus

A common complaint about GNOME is that it has a certain fetish for icons. Menu entries, buttons - everything has an icon attached to it which often wastes space needlessly by making buttons larger than they need to be, as well as menus wider than they need to be. The good news (for me, at least) is that the next GNOME release will have all these icons removed.

The way Gtk+ and GNOME put icons everywhere has always bothered me. In menus, such tiny icons are only clutter, and don't appear to give any useful information. When it comes to buttons, they have the nasty tendency to completely mess up things like button size, button text alignment, and they make buttons "unstable"; icons carry more visual weight than the text, mentally toppling buttons over.

The new GNOME release will do away with icons on menu items and on dialog buttons. The exceptions are menu items which represent a dynamic object such as applications, files or bookmarks, and devices. This obviously means that the GNOME panel, as well as the panel menus, will still show icons for their items.

The end result? These few shots clearly show the benefits:

What is as of yet unknown, however, is whether or not this will get a GUI checkbox so you can switch back to the old behaviour. Since there are talks of removing the "Interface" tab from the Appearance tab altogether, it's unclear where such an option would go even if they wanted it in. Else, it will be a trip to gconf-editor.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ubuntu 9.04 Receives OpenJDK 6 Certification

Canonical, through Matthias Klose, announced on July 11th, 2009 that the Ubuntu Java development team had completed the certification of the OpenJDK 6 platform for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). This means that the OpenJDK 6 package included in Ubuntu 9.04 has passed the meticulous tests of the Java Standard Edition Test. Compatibility Kit and that it is now fully compatible with the Java Standard Edition 6 platform, on both i386 and amd64 architectures. What is OpenJDK? It is a 100% free and open-source implementation of Sun's popular Java Standard Edition 6 platform. On the other hand, Java TCK (Test Compatibility Kit) is a toolkit that provides tests, tools and documents intended to help developers determine if Java implementations are compliant or not.
Read more

Can VLC 1.0 change the world?

VLC 1.0 has about 6 million downloads since its launch a few days ago, and the number was climbing at over 11 per second at last count. I have had VLC for a few years, and you may be wondering what the big deal is. Start with the fact it breaks all the assumptions we’ve had about the proprietary video world. It reads anything , and ignores everything producers try to put in front of your video experience. On a Netflix DVD it will skip the previews, for instance. As Matt Asay notes, VLC records as well as plays video so you can hoard everything Anne Hathaway has ever done on your hard drive. It can be used as a server to stream video to others. Even while VLC may be a better player than what you have under Windows, its heritage is Linux, and open source. It’s licensed under the GPL V.2 and is compatible with the open source Ogg Theora codec. It supports many other codecs as well. The VLC team is aware they have something special. They have ditched their old logo, a roadside traff...
Read more

ISRO All Set To Launch Bhuvan Mapping Service Today!

Hailed as the Google Earth killer, Bhuvan is an indigenous mapping system developed by ISRO to focus only on the Indian sub-continent. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is all set to unveil today its new mapping service Bhuvan -- considered to be a tough competitor to Google Earth and Wikimapia. Bhuvan, which means 'earth' in Sanskrit, will allow users to have a closer look at any part of the subcontinent barring sensitive locations such as military and nuclear installations. Dr G Madhavan Nair, chairman, ISRO will launch the Bhuvan webportal at a function today in the presence of Prithviraj Chavan, minister of state in the Prime Minister's Office. Developed by ISRO, Bhuvan allows users to zoom far closer than the aerial view from a chopper. Bhuvan will be able to deliver high resolution imagery data of the order of five metres. On the other hand, Google Earth shows details up to 200 metres distance and Wikimapia up to 50 metres. Bhuvan will focus only on the I...
Read more