Choosing the 'right' icon for an application

Robin Norwood rnorwood at redhat.com
Mon Jul 14 17:00:43 UTC 2008


Hi,

So I've been looking at importing the icons for applications for the
Fedora Applications web site [1].  We'd like to show an icon next to a
given application, preferably the one the user would see in the menus
after installing said app.  This is, of course, complicated.  I can
currently look for icons inside each rpm in Fedora, specifically the
rpm providing the application we're interested in, and the various
*-icon-theme rpms.  My current thinking is, for each application:

o Get the icon name from the application's .desktop file.

o Look in /usr/share/icons for icons matching that name from the
various default Fedora themes.

o Pick an appropriately-sized icon png (probably 48x48).
  - We could also store svg instead of png.

o Create a map that looks something like this:
  OS -> Application -> Theme -> icon

  With a 'generic' theme for icons provided by the application.

o Save the above map and icon data in the web application's database.

o When picking an icon to show the user, pick the one from their
currently-selected theme and OS (if we know it), falling back to an icon
from the Fedora or 'generic' theme.


Does this sound sane?  I don't know enough about how icons work to know
if I've missed something.

[1] https://fedorahosted.org/amber/

Thanks,

-RN

-- 
Robin Norwood
Red Hat, Inc.

"The Sage does nothing, yet nothing remains undone."
-Lao Tzu, Te Tao Ching




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