[Echo] August 2008 News

Thu Aug 28 15:47:13 UTC 2008

Hi,

Since some important things happened in echo-icon-theme last month I
decided summarize them in one e-mail.

New icons
---------

We've created/fixed some new icons, concretely:
        * preferences-system-date
        * preferences-system-firewall
        * preferences-system-users
        * printer

All of them are used in they System -> Administration menu and part of
our work towards filling this menu with Echo icons (since most of
applications in there don't have even new-gnome-styled icons) [1].

"Huge" icons - 256x256
----------------------

With the introduction of One Canvas Workflow (will be explained bellow)
I decided I could try doing more detailed and realistic looking version
of the printer icon. How it ended you can check at git repo [2]. Nicu
was seemingly pleasured with the new introduced HW brand - Echo and
noted that if such device indeed existed it would definitely worked with
Fedora out of box. 

I'd like to hear others opinion of using such style for these icons. The
basic difference from other styles are semitransparent borders (usually
with opacity set to 0.3) and more detail. Other than that it remains
same as other sizes. If we agree on this style, I'll add it to
Guidelines [3], together with source for the echo brand ;-)

One Canvas Work-flow
--------------------

Together with creating the printer icon, I explored jimmac's idea of one
canvas workflow [4]. In my short experience it is superior work-flow to
our current one and also makes automating many steps of icon creation
easier. Most importantly it helps artist to focus more on the process of
designing/drawing the icon rather than various "secretary" jobs
around...

Together with the desire to automate as much of the secondary work as
possible I needed to bring the work-flow to yet another level - so you
need to add label to the 48x48 icon (which therefore needs to be
grouped) and set it to scalable. It is so that the script can recognize
that it's the very icon intended to be installed into the scalable
folders (and delete the rest). 

Initial screen-cast showing this and subsequent commit of the icon to
git is available at my fedorapeople page [5].

I'd like to make this work-flow the preferred one for echo-icon-theme
creation so if no one steps in, I'll add it to Guidelines.

I attach current version of template which can be used as base in
Inkscape to create icons using this work-flow.

Automating The Secondary Jobs
-----------------------------
One Canvas work-flow makes one thing much easier - ability to create
script which takes the source icon and add it to git repository. I
called this script echo-add-icon and it's already available in echo git
repository [6]. It takes the source SVG, generates PNGs for all included
sizes and SVG for the scalable "size" and put all, including source into
their rightful places in the git repository. The original source is put
into <git-repo>/sources/base/one-canvas/<context> to make it distinct
from the legacy sources (i.e. one source SVG per one size). It currently
pushes only to base folders, but can be easily extended to ask if we
want to push to base or to extras.

It does not make branch specific changes (i.e. adding symlinks / adding
to build system) but I hope to implement it as well in some future
version of the script. It also does not push the changes back to fh.o
only prints a message to the user that he should do so.

Another script is meant to simplify the git set up process. I called it
echo-set-up and is also uploaded to git [7]. It does all the steps
needed for starting work with the repository.

Yet another script is make for updates (useful e.g. when we introduce
new branch to echo git repo). It updates all branches, if some of the
branches is missing, it correctly creates it. I called it echo-update
and it's also available in echo git [8].

I also plan to add one another simple script, probably called
echo-new-icon that would take latest version of the one-canvas template
and create new icon (with given name) from it. Similar to what
rpmdev-newspec do for spec files ;-)

I plan to package these scripts for fedora under the name echo-artist,
therefore I added some necessary things like license (LGPLv2.1+) or
credits (since the first script is based off jimmac's [9]).

Echo for F10?
-------------
It has been briefly discussed here, on the art list, whether to include
Echo in F10 as our default icon theme and whether submit it as a
Feature. Many people seemed to agree that it would not hurt pinging
fesco about it, but that the main decision would probably be done by Art
and Desktop teams.

Further Plans
-------------
Apart from creating new icons and plans mentioned above, I also hope to
update/extend various echo related how-to's to reflect the new methods
of echo icon creation/addition. 

Apart from that I'd like to make some "promo" page that would be
intended for potential contributors and contained all info they need to
know to get started and other similar info.

Request for Feedback
--------------------
As usual, I am more than open for all kinds of feedback, especially
about the huge size guidelines, the new scripts and one canvas
work-flow. If you have ideas how to further improve some of the above
mentioned things, or just comments to what I said, would like to start
contributing to Echo, ... feel free to reply either directly to this
e-mail, or, if you wish, drop a private e-mail to me (you can use e.g.
the fedora address: mso AT fedora project DOT org [note: the address is
"obfuscated" as a spam prevention and there are not any spaces in the
original]) :)

Thanks,
Martin

References:
[1] https://fedorahosted.org/echo-icon-theme/milestone/0.3.3
[2]
http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=echo-icon-theme;a=blob_plain;f=base/256x256/devices/printer.png
[3] https://fedorahosted.org/echo-icon-theme/wiki/Guidelines
[4] http://blip.tv/file/1075329?filename=Jimmac-OneCanvasWorkflow306.ogg
[5] http://mso.fedorapeople.org/screencasts/echo-add-icon-screencast.ogg
[6]
http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=echo-icon-theme;a=blob_plain;f=sources/echo-artist/echo-add-icon
[7]
http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=echo-icon-theme;a=blob_plain;f=sources/echo-artist/echo-set-up
[8]
http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=echo-icon-theme;a=blob_plain;f=sources/echo-artist/echo-update
[9] http://pastebin.ca/1071599
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