Re: dia consistency (look & feel of graphical elements)

[Lars Clausen <lrclause cs uiuc edu>]

On 10 Sep 2003, debacle@knorke.in-berlin.de wrote:
> Hi,
>
> being a CLI guy, I normally don't care very much about GUI
> things.  However, while hacking on dia, I found some
> look&feel inconsistencies, I don't understand.  Maybe,
> somebody can explain this to me.
>
> First, the so-called "Assorted" elements are simpler than
> one might expect.  E.g. there is way to add text or
> connection points.  These elements are not as "professional"
> as some other elements and should maybe not be shown in the
> first section.  Why not just add them to the "Misc" section?

They, like most other elements, are SVG shapes rather than programmed
objects, and thus appear fairly primitive.  Alan, you have any comments?

> Second, the "Ciso" elements look very different from all
> other elements.  Inverting all of them would make them more
> "dia-like".  Many of the icons are much larger (e.g. 83x49)
> than all other icons (22x22?), which looks not so good,
> compared to the other sections.  Some elements are more or
> less dupes.  E.g. the cloud is like the "Network" cloud, but
> without the feature to hold text.  Why?

The Cisco elements were made automatically from figures published by Cisco
themselves.  They do look funny, kinda like they could be inverted and look
better, but that turns out not to be the case when you actually try it.
Try for instance with the web_cluster icon.

The icons ought to be resized, though some of them are going to be hard to
understand at that size.

-Lars

-- 
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause)| HĂ„rdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I   |----------------------------
will defend to the death your right to say it."   | Where are we going, and
    --Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire  | what's with the handbasket?