Talk:Opinion Icons
Different icon for thumbnails
Currently, we have this icon as symbol for "click here to enlarge the picture". In a discussion at commons-l where this and other posts were written, it was said, that we might need a better icon for this. I guess this project could be the right place to do it. --Flominator 13:53, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
Thoughts from Dispenser
Some thoughts on the icons chosen:
- The globe used for the external link icon, while near universal, is ambiguous. A better icon would just to use the icon that is next to external links (
). - The chain while a clever pun and used in many HTML authoring programs; it continues to remain unclear non-English speakers and those without prior experiance.
- Image icon is hard to read, far too much detail. Perhaps using a paint brush or digital camera (looking at the backside display?). Earlier versions of Windows had wavy borders (like in old photos) were clearer to read. Another option is a simple screenshot of the floating image thumbnail.
- I mistake this for a spell checking icon. This is likely due to a similar icon in the status bar in MS Word for background spell checking.
"Advanced" should be renamed to "Extended", since it doesn’t actually provide the advanced features (that's in "Special Characters"!?!). The external link icon malfunctions with text selections. It should be able to detect the difference between the title and the links perhaps based on a regular expression.
The new skin vector, while on the surface is a nice new design, it is unpolished in colors and screen real estate. The edit box bare fits into my Firefox’s window (netbook, screen resolution: 1024x800). This is annoying as I have to scroll the outer window. I would like to suggest the team look into making a scroll-less edit box with floating toolbars, such that there will only be the outer scroll bars at any time. Additionally about half the colors that the developer has chosen blending white or black and judging from PDF screenshots I'd say that they were bitten by darker gamma from older macs.
How is the extensibility and customizability? Two items in English Wikipedia that would added immediately is a port of refTools and template menu/index system. A template tab would likely be all the amboxes and their inline equivalents that could be placed on another “tab”. This would appear much in the same way as files are displayed on OS X with a preview in the final pane. I would prefer if this was defer in loading.
&emdash; Dispenser 20:53, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
- The toolbar is expandable with additional tool icons. Special characters will live on the toolbar, but we couldn't make it enable due to technical issues in importing language specific config. --Shuhari 06:51, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
Bold / Italic
In the new "edit toolbar" there are two buttons for "bold" and "italic". Using the "a" as indicator is a bad idea. Because of having another a for italic (single-story lowercase) it looks like you can switch the font type or something different. I was confused until seeing the tooltips. Not many people know, that this type of a is used in italic. --APPER 21:29, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
- Totally agree. This confused me as well. Anxietycello 16:56, 14 July 2009 (UTC)
- We plan to have b and i for english WPs, f and k for the german, etc... I will do some and support guidelines to create those icons for every language.--Juxn 11:27, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
Compression
When releasing new icons (and updating the old ones), you should attempt to use the proper file type(gif or png, not jpeg), and also use lossless compression when releasing as png.
| Icon | Size Before (in bytes) | Size After (in bytes) |
|---|---|---|
|
547 | 464 |
|
437 | 346 |
|
547 | 440 |
|
635 | 493 |
|
714 | 646 |
|
493 | 413 |
The savings are modest, but there's no reason to not be losslessly compressing and optimizing them.
Now if you look at icons currently in use such as
| Icon | Size Before (in bytes) | Size After (in bytes) |
|---|---|---|
| File:Arrow-down-icon.png | 288 | 142 |
| File:Page-base.png | 214 | 90 |
| File:Portal-break-ltr.png | 293 | 252 |
| File:User-icon.png | 345 | 270 |
|
5539 | 4622 |
Now while the savings are only a kilobyte,there is much more that can be compressed in the toolbar. Together loaded millions of times, you can save bandwidth. Not only is it wasted bandwidth for this wiki, but its wasted bandwidth for other mediawikis, and don't forget that its wasted time for people. There are many other images in the trunk which could be compressed, but aren't. Please don't let this happen to your images.
There is a lot easy to use compression software out there from gimp, to pngguantlet, and pngout. (I can't upload to this wiki as I'm not an admin), but if you would like the compressed images, or want me to help out in compressing the images...I've bugged the devs but not much of a response...let me know on my english wiki talk page. Thanks.Smallman12q 01:25, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
Quick question please reply
This won't be a forced switch, will it? (At least for users) All forced switch...es(?) go down badly, such as the youtube beta, facebook, etc... please reply on my normal wiki page, the english one at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JMS_Old_Al
Thanks!
the icons will be a part of the new toolbar which can be switched on/off in the preferences. --Juxn 11:30, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
Table icon
At my resolution (1920 x 1200), the table icon on the toolbar is little more than a white box. I had to get really close to the screen to see that there are fine blue lines indicating a table. --Laser brain 13:56, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
- the table icon will be reworked. thx for your comment--Juxn 11:31, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
Sign icon only shows up on talk pages
On one hand, i think this is a clever way to keep timestamps out of articles. However, there are plenty of non-talk pages where signed discussion occurs. (Usually in the Wikipedia: or Project: namespaces.) Would it be possible to add this icon based on the presence of __NEWSECTIONLINK__, which already denotes such pages? HereToHelp 02:59, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
- I noticed that, but went to check and it appears to show up while editing Wikiprojects. Perhaps it is only excluded from Articlespace? (Though really, we should be careful about propagating something that might splash back onto MediaWiki. Some projects may not oppose signing article-space.) - BalthCat 08:05, 11 August 2009 (UTC)
- That seems to be the case about the article namespace. But for, say, Meta, signing should be available, yes.--HereToHelp 03:39, 12 August 2009 (UTC)