So... I'm working on something new for Oxygen. 🙂

The idea is fairly simple: giving users the option to choose between symbolic and colourful icons for actions, the little things you see in toolbars and menus. One option for people who prefer the clean, monochrome look, another for those who like a bit more colour in their interfaces. You choose, and hopefully everyone is happy.

Sounds easy enough, right?

Heee... well, there's a small problem with that. 🙂

Oxygen is a theme, and themes are brutal things to maintain. Especially when you care about the details, and especially when you want to offer choices without making one of them feel like an afterthought.

Just to give you an idea of the scale of this particular problem, Oxygen has 719 colourful action icons in the 32×32 size alone. Breeze has roughly 1,200 icons, excluding copies and symbolic links. And I'm not simply scaling the existing artwork down and calling it a day. I'm drawing new versions from scratch for 16×16, 22×22, and 32×32, with 24×24 and 48×48 derived directly from the 22×22 versions.

That's a lot of little pictures.

A LOT. Over 9.000!!!! 🙂

So far, I've made approximately 130 new icons in each of those three sizes. You can follow the work in the symbolicActions directory on KDE Invent. with simlinks and sizes around 1150 new files in the past 4 days...

And each one has to work at its intended size, with its own limitations, proportions, and details. What looks perfectly fine at 32 pixels can turn into a muddy mess at 16. A detail that makes an icon recognisable at one size can become noise at another. Sometimes you have to redraw the thing almost entirely to make it work.

Multiply that by hundreds of icons, and you start to understand why maintaining a theme is such a monumental amount of work. And this is just one part of it.

But there's some good news too! Over in Oxygen Labs, we now have a working prototype of a patch for the KDE settings module (KCM) that lets you choose between symbolic and colourful action icons.

Which is rather the point of all this. 🙂

The user gets Options in the settings. Pick the style you prefer in the size you prefer, hit save, and carry on using your computer. They don't need to know about the hundreds of files, the different sizes, or the months spent adjusting individual shapes. Ideally, it just works.

So why bother?

Because We think user options matter. Even when they seem trivial, even when most people will never touch the setting that is very hiden :D, even when the work required to support them seems completely disproportionate to the little checkbox or dropdown that exposes them.

We all use our computers differently. We have different tastes, different habits, different ideas about what makes an interface comfortable to use. Some people love symbolic icons because they keep the interface quiet and consistent. Others prefer colourful icons because they make actions easier to recognise, or simply because they enjoy having a bit more colour around. And I cant make up my mind as i think it depends :D. Neither is wrong. And if we can offer both without compromising the quality of either, why shouldn't we?

Of course, every option has a cost. Someone has to design it, implement it, test it, and keep it working. In a theme like Oxygen, that cost can be enormous, because an apparently small choice can multiply the amount of artwork that needs to exist and be maintained.

But there is a cost to having no choice as well. It means deciding that everyone should use the same thing, whether it suits them or not. Sometimes that's a perfectly reasonable decision. We can't offer a setting for absolutely everything. But I don't think we should dismiss options just because the work behind them is invisible.

Because apparently, giving people a choice between two kinds of tiny pictures is how I choose to spend my free time. Anyway, there's still plenty to do, but I'm slowly making my way through this rather ridiculous pile of icons. One at a time. on the bright side my daily commits now rival Laurent :D,.... J.K. im only human 😀

On some other news, due to popular demand (all 3 of you) ;(, we are going to make a new video on the qml theming thing, I'm thinking on doing the switch element with a twist ( a literal one ). Wil keep you posted