Comments on: I’ve created a monster!

By: The days are long at night » Blog Archive » Noisy icons

The days are long at night » Blog Archive » Noisy icons — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 14:46:06 +0000

[...] Some people have been pondering the idea of not showing any icons in GNOME application’s menus. These two guys are known to know what they are talking about so I gave it a try (icons are easily turned off in the preferences panel). [...]

By: Ben FrantzDale

Ben FrantzDale — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 05:03:50 +0000

I agree with Tom Hinkle. I find it easier to scan for something by icon than by word. As an extreme example, consider the “rotate” menu on GIMP. I always scan for the arrow rotating the way I want rather than turn my graphical idea into text to compare with the text of the menu for “CCW 90°”. In general I find the fastest way to use menus for applications I know is keyboard accelerators.

One could argue the merits of menus long enough to need icons, but when menus get over a few entries long, I really feel icons make use faster.

By: Eddie Gonzalez

Eddie Gonzalez — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 10:59:17 +0000

If you’ve ever had to use a program that is only available in a language you can’t read what-so-ever (Like Chinese in my case.) Icons (and mnemonics) are wonderful. Especially for dialogs! I don’t think GNOME’s current use of icons looks bad at all and it has this wonderful side-effect of allowing someone who’s used a program in one language to do basic things in another.

By: Magnus Breder Birkenes

Magnus Breder Birkenes — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 20:11:03 +0000

Performance-wise, I agree. Running GNOME without icons in menus, on buttons etc. makes the system a lot more speedy.

But, for me, icons make the computer easier to use, because I have a visual handicap. When I see the symbol of an empty screen in my menus, I know that clicking that will start the terminal, and I react instantly without having to read the text (which can take time).

So, a good compromise can be to let the user choose, as of today, perhaps by making the non-icon way the standard one.

By: Random pixels » Blog Archive » A picture is a word aswell

Random pixels » Blog Archive » A picture is a word aswell — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 14:46:41 +0000

[...] I’ve tried tigerts idea, disabling icons in menus and buttons since a couple of weeks back now. Know what? It actually works really good, it also looks really clean. It felt a bit strange to begin with, but the idea is growing on me. [...]

By: ra1n

ra1n — Sat, 19 Nov 2005 20:12:55 +0000

Just my two cents on OSX menus, yes they don’t have menus, but they have clear and easy to remember keyboard shortcuts on them, which are very easy to learn and speedup a lot working.
This is done with an easy trick, modifiers are icons let me explain, in the PC world we commonly have shift, ctrl and alt(sometimes called meta) modifiers and those labels are written on the keyboard, on a mac keyboard we have the same keys (alt is also known as option) plus command (or apple key) and every modifier has an icon associated to it (with the exception of ctrl which its represented by the ^ sign, but is labeled ctrl on the keyboard)
For common tasks,in this way, it’s very easy learn the shortcut, and simply forget of the menus

By: raven

raven — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 09:18:59 +0000

too much teh icons!

I fully agree. Another good example would be the current gimp. It’s also stuffed with icons but now it’s even harder to find what you need in those menus than it was before.

By: Luke Hoersten

Luke Hoersten — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 21:13:43 +0000

AAH! Yes I totally agree then. I read “making navigation easier by having select icons”… I was assuming that you wanted to remove the rest by default. Correct me if I am wrong but you are saying that gnome apps should be made to support both icon users and non-icon users? Making clear menu lables is an awesome idea and i’ve noticed that some distros already do this. I’ve used java desktop and thats pretty much all they did: change the .desktop files so the menus were more coherent. But like I said. I use the icons so that I can visually grep the menu and not have to read them.

I happen to prefer Garretts firefox skin out of all the rest because it is so visual and I dont have to think to navigate. I can keep concentrated on the content of the web page I am viewing.

Like you said though, there are 2 types of people. Visual and non-visual. The only clear solution I can see is to make it clear and simple that there is a choice and try to make other design settings based on that as well. I’m very happy with your post now and applaud your paradigm breaking thinking =)

By: Luke Hoersten

Luke Hoersten — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 03:31:00 +0000

I know you’ve got a million comments already and you probably wont even read this but I just wanted to give my 2 cense. I personally love all the icons. It makes it so you dont have to read every menu item every time you want to click it. Instead, your brain recognises the color/shape pattern and you can go right to it. I use macs a lot and find that I have trouble jumping through menus quickly because they dont have unique icons for everything.

I do think that what you said perfectly applies to the gnome panel though. To get the funtionality you want, it requires the panel to look cluttered and bloated. I have no idea how this can be changed though =(

By: Cristiano Canguçu

Cristiano Canguçu — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 13:48:16 +0000

I strongly disagree. I think you are mislead here: icons are not for emphasis, but for make navigation easy. It really makes using GNOME much easiear than windows.

“Oh, Windows and OSX do not do that… We must be wrong!”

I don’t think so… That is one thing GNOME does BETTER than the other GUIs. In other example, my navigation when I used MS Word 2003 was better than Word 2000 and Word 97 because it have much more icons on menus.

Yes, it is “learned”. But GNOME should begin to respect learned user behavior too.