RE: Icons for IM programs

[Xavier Claessens <xclaesse gmail com>]

On ven, 2007-05-18 at 15:43 -0500, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote:
> (sorry if double-posted, I had some email forwarding issues)
> 
> Hellooo :)
> 
> On 5/18/07, Jaap Haitsma <jaap haitsma org> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > I would like hear the opinion of developers from all IM clients and tango
> > > > artists to see if we can create a common icon set.
> > >
> > > I agree completely.
> > >
> > > I can see some applications still wanting to add their own themes for
> > > somethings like smileys and status icons, but a theme that fits in with
> > > the rest of the desktop would be really nice.
> > >
> > Pidgin has already been given a very nice tango icon set by the tango
> > artists. So it could be just a matter to get them in the icon naming
> > spec and putting them in gnome icon theme.
> >
> They are pretty nice, but I bumped into a problem this days... it's
> not really serious but it would make a difference in certain
> circumstances.
> 
> I was talking with a friend on Yahoo and we started playing with the
> emoticons of Pidgin. At first we didn't recognize some of the icons
> because we were used to default Yahoo ones, but after some playing we
> get used to the tango theme.
> But then this idea hit us. If the person that I'm IM'ing is using the
> Yahoo icons (on the official client or in an old Gaim or whatever),
> how can I tell that the icon I'm seeing/sending means the same in the
> other guy's screen?.
> Maybe I send a "Weird" icon and in the other side it's understood as
> "Holy cow!" because of the theme difference.
> 
> It's not an issue exclusive to Pidgin or a possible gnome-im-icons, I
> wanted to comment it anyway because it _makes_ a difference sometimes.
> 

I think the solution here is to have yahoo icons if it's possible by
licences. Like that we can have icon names like "face-yahoo-something",
"face-msn-something", etc...

I'm not sure things like that should go to gnome-icon-theme even if it's
ok for licences.

If licences are a problem we can make a seperate package for
yahoo/msn/etc icons like that distributions like ubuntu can have them in
multiverse.

Xavier.