Scipad icon

[Enrico Segre]

Hi Vincent,

>Why don't you choose an icon from the Tango project 
>(http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Desktop_Project) ? We use it for all 
>Scilab icons.

thanks for pointing Tango to me. I endorse their mission, and am impressed by the quality of their work.
However, I think I have a point. I'd like to stick to a certain "scipad style".

A couple of years ago, when we introduced the body of the debugger icons, me and Francois had quite a look around about usable, royalty free sets of debugger icons. Our conclusions for what I can remember were that a) the gnome icons were the best candidate being nice, professional, free, themed and clear, but b) there was not enough variety for representing standard or less standard debugger actions (like breakpoint, step in, step over...)  c) we anyway anticipated that some debugger actions might be peculiar of scipad and not exactly mapped even upon a standard debugger icon set. Other non-free icon sets we looked at at that time included those of the matlab editor, visual studio, labview. I gave then a try with gimp, and something came out, and there we staid. There was even some semiology in our intentions - pink dots represent breakpoints, graduated red-white dots on a black background represent scipad code, an arrow is the line of execution of a scilab script, a blue box is a function. 
I'm anyway no graphic artist, and the result was certainly mediocre at best, and can't compete with Tango. However, I wouldn't throw away the attached meaning to this set of icons. Perhaps we could consider to revamp them according to the Tango style guidelines, which are certainly well laid out and justified, but that is an extensive work.
Now, I'm making a long story about an aesthetic issue of perhaps minor importance (well, usability...), but I think that the choice deserves a word of explanation. 

>The icon used in the toolbar for Scipad comes form the Tango project and 
>is available in other sizes than the one we use by default.

Technicalities aside (16x16 vs 48x48, whatever), I think the choice is between a standardizing set of very nice icons for common application tasks (open file, save as..), or specialized icons, "because scilab is special". Or anything in between, as the tango style is commendable and most debugger actions are standard in program development environments, but we might want to keep some peculiarity of scilab.

Comments welcome,
Enrico