Re: two or more lines of icons

On Tue, Oct 14, 2003 at 03:29:36PM +0000, Uwe Brauer wrote: I said _UI_ disaster. Apart from a very small number of extremely conventional icons, they pretty much suck at conveying any useful meaning. Unstable, I wouldn't know. Unusable, oh yes. http://kile.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html Let's just leave aside the MDI setup and the fact that the application tries simultaneously to be an IDE, Word and a LaTeX editor and fails miserably at all three, and let's have a look at the icon bar. The first three icons are conventional, new/open/save. Unless they aren't of course, it may be open/save as/save. The fourth one, a stop button? What the hell is a stop button doing in a text editor? Then the second part. I guess it's undo/redo because of the icons next to it, but it could be movement commands. The next 3 are conventional too, except the standard order is cut/copy/paste to mirror x/c/v, but heh. And then the real fun starts. I have zero clue about what any of the other icons means, and I'm especially amused at the presence of a second stop button. Do you have two brakes on a car depending on whether you go forwards or backwards? And, well, it's a document editor, so what if I want to print? I can guess the paper thingy means print, but there are _4_ icons with that symbol in it. Which one the click? I leave the righteous indignation at seeing the B/I/O/justification icons in a LaTeX editor as an exercise to the reader. And the amusement at seeing the icons to type ^ and _ or the two x/y icons that only seem to differ by size. Icons were a good thing at the time of Mac Paint. You had a small number of icons for the file i/o and copy/paste operations which were generalized among all applications and the others were usually rooted in real-world objects like the pen or the eraser, or in direct visual feedback like B/I/U or justification. And even then some were annoying, like the "fill" one which was different for every new program and unfathomable each time. But icons don't work well when you try to convey concepts. And now, after some years of feature creep, you get the multiline toolbars that are unusable but look so cool in screenshots and where the artists were clearly lacking imagination well before the end. We do not need this crap in XEmacs, especially for the sake of windows users that want more icons just because that looks cool. The menubar sucks already enough as it is (even if it is better than some years ago, but the option menu needs to die for instance, and the help menu needs a manual for itself), we do not need to add multi-lines of useless crap. OG.