Call for an official Mozilla Sunbird theme

Discuss application theming and theme development.
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kepstin
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Post by kepstin »

The edit and delete icons used were taken directly from the firefox 0.9 bookmarks editor. If those icons havn't changed in 0.9.1, and we want to be consistant with firefox's "winstripe" them, the shadowing should match those icons and the main firefox icons.
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markcarson
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Post by markcarson »

kepstin,

Thanks for pointing that out. I had seen them there also but forgot about the location later on. When I select small icons in Firefox, the main toolbar switches to 16x16 icons, but the Manage Bookmarks toolbar appears to retain the larger 24x24 icons. Do you know if there are small versions of the Edit/Rename and Delete icons in Firefox which we can "lift" for the Sunbird 16x16 toolbar? I hacked some already by cutting down the 24x24 icons, but I'd rather use the real deal if they exist.

My unfinished work on the 16x16 set: <img src="http://markcarson.com/images/btn-1-16x16.png">

Thanks
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kepstin
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Post by kepstin »

There arn't any 16x16 versions of the bookmark icons in 0.9. I'm in the process of upgrading to 0.9.1 right now, but I don't think new icons were added to the bookmarks window in it.
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markcarson
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Post by markcarson »

I've already upgraded to 0.9.1 and I didn't see them. No big deal, The Cut, Copy, Paste and Print were lifted from the 16x16 toolbar and the resized/hand tweaked Edit and Delete look ok to me at 16x16. I've just got 3 icons more to do, then make the hover and disabled "stripes" and these will be done as a matching set to the 24x24 demo toolbar.
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markcarson
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Post by markcarson »

Revised combined toolbar image - 24x24 icons and new matching 16x16 icon set. As always, for review. I will post individual icons later to my website. Also I plan to look into a better alarm icon for the Options Dialog.

<img src="http://markcarson.com/images/btn-1-15x3.png">

<img src="http://markcarson.com/images/btn-1-16-15x3.png">

BTW - regarding drop shadows, the current Firefox build has drop shadows on some icons but not on others.

UPDATE (03-JUL-2004) - referenced images (above) now reflect correct icon ordering.
Last edited by markcarson on July 3rd, 2004, 8:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Chris Cook
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Post by Chris Cook »

I've created a new jar (for Sunbird, not the calendar extension) with the updated toolbar icons. The options dialog is now also styled and has "some" icons. I'll add the newer icons when they've stabilized.

http://www.intraplanar.net/projects/sunbird/calendar-2.jar

By the way, Mark, can you keep the same icon order in your future toolbar images? I had to rearrange the icon order in this latest version or I would have had to change all the button css. They need to be in the following order:
  1. New event
  2. Edit
  3. Delete
  4. Day View
  5. Week View
  6. Multiweek
  7. Month View
  8. the rest
The remainder are currently not used in Sunbird. Are they used in the calendar extension? I couldn't get that the extension to work (only tried once and it mangled my profile and I wasn't happy so didn't try again) so I don't know.
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markcarson
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Post by markcarson »

Chris,

I will reorder the combined graphic tomorrow in the order given. Thanks for posting the jar.
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FlashBanG
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Post by FlashBanG »

Markcarson:

Love the new Export and import icons. Great work. I think they clearly show what they do now.

I think the new icons can be put into a beta release now.they seem to maintain consistency throughout.

Jeffhot:

No offense to you, but i prefer markcarson's logo/icon of sunbird simply because it seems to share Thunderbird/Firefox's look. IMHO, i think that we should try to maintain consistency with those 2 apps, and this would e a good way to indicate that.

Regarding the namechange:
I like the Sun part of the name, as sun has always indicated dates (Sundial, sun-centric calendar, etc.) so sun somehow to me, says time.

I dont know about the bird part. personally, i dont have anything against it, and i think the name is a good one, but i agree with the fact that if a name change is going to occur it has to be now, when sunbird isnt in the mainstream yet (we hsould learn from firefox's mistakes).


Anyway, looking forward to a finised product (i believe we're there sans the options dialog)


Mostafa and sunbird devs:

Is sunbird going to follow Fx/Tb in the new Theme/Extension manager update? If we know now, then markcarson and the others can make the icons now? As long as we're overhauling the user interface, this might be a good time to do it?


That's my rant for the day, ladies and gentlemen :-)
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FlashBanG

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markcarson
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Post by markcarson »

The combined graphics (see 4 posts up from this one) have been updated to reflect the correct icon ordering.

Also, my website now has date-picker and time-picker icons with all 4 states (up, down, hover, disabled) in both PNG and GIF formats. The reason there are in both formats is that the current calendar.jar still used GIF for some icons. Both were developed and posted in anticipation of XUL/CSS migration to full PNG use in the future.

<a href="http://MarkCarson.com/images">http://MarkCarson.com/images</a>

I'm working on the Timezone, Views, and Alarm icons for the Options dialog. I hope to have them posted over the weekend.

Also FlashBanG - there is a Bugzilla entry which discusses a number of the questions you asked Mostafa. Reading it you will see, as I did, that Chris Cook has done an excellent job of raising the issues pertaining to this theme initiative.

<a href="http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=248399">http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=248399</a>

BTW - sirchode started another thread to let people wrestle with that sticky name issue so we can be free of that issue on this thread (I hope): <a href="http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=616658#616658">http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=616658#616658</a>
Last edited by markcarson on July 4th, 2004, 3:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
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sirchode
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Post by sirchode »

I'm starting to feel a little odd about the view buttons. They started to look pretty cramped after I stared at them for a while. I realized that my Palm has a pretty nice way of displaying them, I thought maybe I'd take a screenshot of how Palm decided to tackle the issue:

Image

Again, I know I'm nobody, but thought I'd throw in my $0.02.
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jeanjean
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Post by jeanjean »

sirchode wrote:I'm starting to feel a little odd about the view buttons. They started to look pretty cramped after I stared at them for a while. I realized that my Palm has a pretty nice way of displaying them, I thought maybe I'd take a screenshot of how Palm decided to tackle the issue:

Image

Again, I know I'm nobody, but thought I'd throw in my $0.02.


I like this. That would make the interface clearer.

Buttons -> call for functions or actions
Panes -> Show panes (week view, day view)

If implemented in the default theme or another one it would make- imho - sunbird more reactfull(?).
mvl
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Post by mvl »

I'm not sure about the tabs.
Usually, tabs give access to different data. Like in the browser. Different pages for each tab.
But here, the tabs give access to the same data, but using a different view. It's a subtle detail. I wouldn't except one tab to change the other. But if i go to some date, i want the other views to be at that data too.
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markcarson
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Post by markcarson »

I'm not sure about it either, even though its an interesting idea.

<img src="http://markcarson.com/images/Sample-Tabbed.png">

As you can see, it takes away screen real estate, rather than improving on the data/chrome ratio. The toolbar is nearly naked, but we can't reclaim the vertical space for anything as toolbars consume the entire horizontal width of the screen. Whether the tabs go at the top or bottom of the data area, they still eat up vertical space. For the mock-up I placed them at the bottom as putting the tabs at the top makes the navigation/header area really cluttered and confusing. Since this is a quick and dirty mock-up I used the 16x16 view icons I already had. Using icons as small as on a PDA is not a good plan. Too hard to read at that size and the difference between multi-week and month would be lost to all but the most eagle-eyed of users. I'm not saying that 16x16 is the idea size for tab icons, but the 12x12 (I'm guessing in the sirchode's example) are clearly too small to differentiate multi-week from month if the only difference is dropping a couple of dots on the top and bottom rows. Perhaps other icons might work.

Anyway, I like the idea. I'm not sure its an improvement, and I'm pretty sure it would require XUL/CSS changes way more far-reaching than the task at hand. Supporting a tabbed interface is more than a theme change, (AFAIK), its more of an application UI change. Anyone, jump in here and correct me if I'm wrong about this. Point being, it exceeds the scope of our theme work, plus I'm not sure what it buys us (since its worse in terms of screen real estate) except that it is a different metaphor which may or may not be more appropriate. I do appreciate that the tabs make sense in that it alters the view of the data in the same way that a spreadsheet can have tabular data on one sheet and the same data presented as a pie chart on another tab. Also the view icons are not "action" icons, hence they might not belong on the toolbar at all. So, I like sirchode's thinking, but I'm not in favor of the change at this point.

Whew...
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richwklein
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Post by richwklein »

If we just changed the view buttons to be a checkbox type button that might help, but I think there is an issue where native theme rendering on windows xp is not getting a pressed/checked state.

[Edit] Here is the bug about it http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176177 [/Edit]
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Chris Cook
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Post by Chris Cook »

richwklein wrote:If we just changed the view buttons to be a checkbox type button that might help, but I think there is an issue where native theme rendering on windows xp is not getting a pressed/checked state.

[Edit] Here is the bug about it http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176177 [/Edit]

Regardless of the button appearance, these should have been radio buttons from the beginning. But this is all OT so lets try to keep the discussion focused on theme issues.
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