[Bf-interface] General purpose icons for Blender Addons?

[Campbell Barton]

On Sat, May 9, 2015 at 8:32 PM, Gaia <gaia.clary at machinimatrix.org> wrote:
> Hi;
>
> Below i propose a few new Icons for general purpose.
> Actually i have named the icons with general purpose in mind,
> so they are not bound to a specific use case:
>
> - WARN (in addition to INFO and ERROR, but see below)
> - RESET (Reset to defaults)
> - NEUTRAL (for "the neutral element", e.g.: 0, 1, identity matrix, neutral pose)
> - DOWNLOAD
> - UPLOAD
> - TUTORIAL_URL (learning material)
> - REFERENCE_URL (to manual/reference pages)
> - VIDEO_URL
> - DRIVEN (as opposite to DRIVER)
> - WELD
> - BAKE
> - ADJUST
> - SWAP
> - ATTACH
> - DETACH

In general it seems fine to add generic reusable icons:

- WARN

These toom but existing icons may be usable?
- ATTACH/DETACT (use FULLSCREEN_ENTER/EXIT - work OK here?, bad naming though.)
- SWAP (use ARROW_LEFTRIGHT ?)
- DOWNLOAD/UPLOAD (use IMPORT/EXPORT, icons could have arrows made
vertically and be reused for general up/download.)


Gnome symbolic icons are an interesting icon set with a lot of generic
symbols which could be useful to us (ignore more OS related ones -
battery, wiki-strength etc).

http://noosfero.org/pub/Development/ActionItem3002/gnome-sym-icons.png

----

Others am not sure of...

- NEUTRAL, (how to show?)
- Not sure its needed to have different URL icons for every data
type... (tutorial maybe... but others not sure).
- DRIVEN, how to show?
- ADJUST, is a bit like tweak or edit, general concept, how to show?
- SWAP - (use ARROW_LEFTRIGHT ?)



> regarding WARN icon: actually the current ERROR icon is
> like what i would name a WARN sign, so maybe rename
> that icon to WARN and then add a new ERROR icon instead
> Although i am not sure if that is feasible to do.
>
> Of course this list is mostly driven by what i myself am
> missing for our own Blender Addons. So it is clear to me
> that everybody who creates Addons probably have their
> own personal icons wish list, but we can not have 1 million
> icons in Blender as well. So, the very first question that
> raises will be:
>
> "why not provide a function to make my own custom icons?"
>
> Here are 3 arguments why this can be a bad idea:
>
> 1.) it is really not easy to create a good (meaningful) icon and keep
> compatible with the common style of the rest of the application.
>
> 2.) Think of 2 Addons which use different icons for the
> same logical task... Wouldn't that become messy at the end?
>
> 3.) Then... what if the creator of one Addon would  like to  reuse
> the icons from another Addon to avoid reinventing the wheel?
>
> Honestly it would take a burden from me when i can avoid
> to "also" think about awesome custom icons on top of
> creating an awesome plugin
> And no, i think incorporating font awesome is probably
> not the answer (because of its very different style) .
>
> Maybe we can find a reasonable set of general icons
> and then (possibly, hopefully) the icon artist who made
> the blender icons could take a look at this and create
> some that match nicely to blender's existing icon set.
>
> Remark from Inês Almeida / brita_:
>
> If someone wants custom icons for their very
> specific addon, that's a different matter.
> How to create or generate such icons is even another.
> There is a proposal currently under review for getting
> custom images in blender UI,
> be it as an icon or a preview:
>
>   http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-interface/2015-May/000065.html
>
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-interface mailing list
> Bf-interface at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-interface



-- 
- Campbell