Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

What makes a good icon? A good icon is a good visual representation of the subject of the icon. In cases where no visual representation is possible, icon designers usually use metaphors. A good metaphor is the stop symbol that is modeled after the street sign: A red (warning color in most cultures) sign with eight corners is percieved as a stop sign, even without the four letters STOP on it. A case where no metaphor is neccessary are the icons for bold, underline and italic. Just an bold, underlined or italic letter is enough to make the point.

What about link icons, especially the insert link button that can be found in many visual HTML editors of WYSIWYG Wikis: A long time ago an icon designer must have decided to go with an metaphor, more specifically using the fact that a link in the english language can denote a hyperlink or a link in a chain. Thus, the chain became the most prevalent symbol for hyperlinks. In order to emphasize the hyperlink-nature, often a globe symbol was added to the icon, making the original chain almost irrecognizable. A very good icon modeled after the hyperlink=chain link idea can be found in the GNOME desktop:

The problem with this icon and all other icons modeled after the idea of equivalence of hyperlinks and links of a chain is that it is not understood by non-native english speakers who do not recoginze the chain link in the icon and do not equate the concept of a link in a chain with a hyperlink between web pages. The other problem is that is metaphor is not neccessary. When you ask people what mental model of a link they have you will get not one single answer, but when asking how links are perceived, the answer is clear: "a link is underlined text, often blue that turns my mouse cursor into a hand when hovering". Following this observation, my take on a link icon would be modeling what the user percieves as a link, similar to the text formatting icons mentioned before:

Now I have only one problem left: What is a good icon for a concept like WikiWords or hot links, e.g. an action that takes the currently selected text and creates a link out of it?

The Gnome Journal features an interview with two of my personal heros: Jakub Steiner and Andreas Nilsson. They are the leading and drawing heads behind the Tango Icon Project, a project that creates beautifully styled and appealing icons for desktop applications. Mindquarry is using these icons and in fact they are the base of your own Mindquarry Icon Theme.

I wrote about the potential of metadata on the desktop before (A taggable web, a taggable desktop, a taggable workspace and it is good to see the progress of the Tracker project which adds rich metadata facility to the Gnome desktop.

• Jamie McCracken: A Metadata Enabled Gnome
• John Stowers: A Metadata Enabled GNOME

• Topic-oriented authoring
  Not DocBook vs. DITA, but topic-oriented authoring vs. narrative authoring. Norman Walsh says, tpoic-oriented authoring can lead to worse documentation quality due to measuring only coverage, not readability and usefulness.
  (tags: docbook techdoc)
• Inkscape 0.45 - A Pretty Blurry Release | FootNotes
  Inkscape is a remarkable open source vector graphics program, I use it for creating icons for the Mindquarry Collaboration Server.

  (tags: inkscape software macosx gnome cool)

jEdit is a great editor. It is free, runs on every platform, can be extended using plugins, can be scripted using macros, but the default set of icons is a shame. Java swing applications are known to look arkward and jEdit is no exception. But there are some simple steps of getting rid of the default look and feel.

1. If you are using GNOME, you should download Java 1.6 Mustang beta, as it supports the new GTK Look and Feel which makes jEdit look more like a native GTK application. Windows users have no problems, Mac OS X users should follow the next instruction.
2. If you are using Mac OS X: Start jEdit, open /Applications/jEdit/jEdit.app/Contents/Info.plist. This is an XML file, but you just need to find the line containing <string>org.gjt.sp.jedit.jEdit</string> and add following content below: <key>Properties</key> <dict> <key>com.apple.macos.useScreenMenuBar</key> <string>true</string> </dict>. Save the file and restart jEdit. Now the Menu bar will not be part of the main window any more, jEdit uses the Mac OS X menu bar like a proper Mac application.
3. Download the icon set from this forum post and install it to the lib/ext folder of your Java runtime installation. For Mac OS X users, this is probably /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home/lib/ext/, Windows Users should look for C:\Program Files\Java and Linux users should ask their distribution where Java is installed.

The result is a jEdit that looks much more like the cool and powerful application it is.