[Goodies-dev] xfce goodies icon naming standard

[Stefan Ott]

Hi!

2010/11/1 Simon Steinbeiß <simon.steinbeiss at elfenbeinturm.at>:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I create (or: modify, I guess that's closer to the truth) icon themes for xfce a lot recently, I fixed the elementary theme to work better with Xubuntu and now I'm working on yet another theme.
> What I noticed during that process is that there doesn't seem to be any kind of naming-convention for the icons of xfce-goodies (I'm mainly referring to the panel-plugins here). Some of the goodies are using generic gtk-icons that have nothing to do with the function of the respective goody (smartbookmark: gtk-preferences) and others use icons that are either strange (CPUFreq: xfce-unknown) or neither standard nor xfce-specific (xfce4-timer: clock). These are just representational examples, anyone who ever tried to theme the dialog that adds panel-plugins to the panel (<=4.6.2) with fitting icons (or alternatively: looked at the goodies .desktop files for reference) knows how widespread this problem is. Even amongst those goodies that use seemingly useful names - e.g. with a leading "xfce" - are not adhering to any standard i can/could figure out, some are just as well using a leading "xfce4".[1]
>
> Maybe this issue has never come up before or maybe the consequence of deciding upon a standard frightened the devs in question (because having a standard would kind of imply that every goody would ship its own icon), but I thought now that 4.8 finally feels like it's just around the corner I could maybe step up and help solve this.

Frankly, I think usually people (devs) are happy once *some*
reasonable icon shows up :) (I for one am terrible at designing icons
and am always glad when there's something in some gnome theme that I
can steal).

> Changing the goodies launcher files to adhere to the chosen convention is a trivial change, I would step up to design icons for the goodies that don't have any yet (see the cpugraph-plugin icon I did just a few weeks ago for reference to decide whether I'm suitable for this or not) and solve the naming mess.
>
> As a final note on the matter let me propose two possible standards:
> 1) "xfce-" + goody-name
> 2) "xfce4-" + goody-name

Sounds like a good idea to me (might solve a lot of headaches and mean
little to no effort for most goodies devs). Having someone (you) who
is willing to coordinate this is of course very nice too.

Let me know if you need me to make any changes to the radio plugin...

cheers
-- 
Stefan Ott
http://www.ott.net/

"You are not Grey Squirrel?"