[838] in Athena User Interface
Re: PSB comments on panel
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Tue Jul 24 22:08:57 2001
Message-Id: <200107250208.WAA10815@Press-Your-Luck.mit.edu>
To: "andrew m. boardman" <amb@MIT.EDU>
cc: aui@MIT.EDU, jkramer@MIT.EDU, timblack@MIT.EDU
In-reply-to: The events that comprise the history of the universe.
Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 22:08:53 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
> - the tasklist icons do not really have anything to do with the launcher
> icons; given that the textual tags are different, there should be a
> stronger visual association between them
>
> - the miniaturized "Prompt" icon is pretty awful. A "%" could be better.
> Most anything that's going to get a shrunk version of the launcher icon
> is going to look lame (except for the exit sign), especially with the
> text that's part of the icon. If nothing else, nuke and replace with
> the empty window icon.
I investigated this problem. It appears that in the version of Gnome
we are currently using, each program gets to tell the tasklist (via
properties in X, I believe) what it wants its "mini-icon" in the
tasklist to be. If the program does not set an icon in the proper
way, then tasklist assigns it the "unknown icon" icon, which looks
like an empty window.
So in addition to actually generating acceptable icons for the
programs which we care about, we would have to implement changes on a
per-program basis.
gnome-terminal has a command-line flag to set the icon, so this could
be fixed with a simple configuration change. However, if we also
wanted gnome-terminal to have the same icon when invoked manually from
the command line, this would require a small but obvious source code
change to hard-wire the desired icon.
Emacs is currently not setting an icon; we would have to add code to
make it do so. Ditto for XMH.
We do not have source code for the current version of Netscape, which
is the last of the program launchers on the panel, so we cannot change
its icon. Fortunately, it does have a reasonable looking one on the
"Navigator" theme. We could, if deemed appropriate, change the
launcher icon to a ship's wheel, for more visual consistency. (I'm
sure there must be one available from Netscape from somewhere.) On
the other hand, if/when MIT upgrades to a new version of Netscape or
Mozilla, this will probably change. Who knows, that might even happen
within the year.
Someone has suggested to the Gnome project a feature whereby the
tasklist has some say in setting the icon. This would be a much
better solution to the problem of visual consistency for us, I think.
I don't know if it's likely to get implemented unless we take an
interest in doing so.
-B.
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Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
MIT STS/Course 6 (EECS) - MIT Athena User Interface Project
The Talk of MIT ** http://web.mit.edu/beland/talk/talk.html
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