It’s been five years since the launch of the Tango project and the icon-naming-spec and I think we have done a tremendous work since then. Just look at some old screenshots of the early GNOME 2.x desktop and compare them with those of today. Thanks to everybody who has been involved!

The style has become so popular that almost all the important Linux software has adopted it. Examples include Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP, Pidgin, Banshee and loads more.

And since it was designed to fit in, applications following the style don’t look out of place in environments that don’t actually follow the guideline. Just try GIMP on OSX, KDE or Windows today and compare it with pre-Tango.

It’s not just the style. Creating icon themes has become a lot easier since then, and, with the introduction of the Icon Naming Specification on freedesktop.org, all major Linux desktop environments conform to the spec.

However, this is only partly true for GNOME. In order to make desktops and apps, who were all calling for different names for the same things, we also introduced icon-naming-utils to map those icons to the icon-naming-spec names. Utilities that we shouldn’t rely on for too long, but allowed us to get pretty results quickly. A workaround to the problem of applications using a huge variation of icon names for the same metaphor.

Five years later, we still rely on the mapping. KDE has moved on since and is spec compliant, so it doesn’t rely on icon mapping any more. This means that KDE can use GNOME icon themes, but not the other way around.

There are some more disadvantages that we have. Browsing the icon directories is tedious because of all the symbolic links and we cannot guarantee icon metaphors. The icon theme is dynamic in its metaphors while an application can use them statically. For example: An application requiring a star icon requests the “star” name, this is mapped to “favourite” in the theme. But this was done by purely  guessing. We do not know that the application wants an actual star icon because it’s a star mapping program or that it’s for rating songs or bookmarking in some form or another.

In light of GNOME 3, and its progress in moving out historical artifacts such as bobono, libglade, hal and others and replacing those with new tools, we think it’s time to finally drop this hacky icon name mapping and go for the real deal instead.

This will have consequences for your application. In GNOME 3, we won’t ship the symbolic links any longer. In addition to that gnome-icon-theme will only cover the icons that are in the naming spec. This means that applications developers that want their application to work well on GNOME 3 need to:

• update the icon names by looking them up from the Icon Naming Specification. (See http://standards.freedesktop.org/icon-naming-spec/icon-naming-spec-latest.html)

• ship icons that are outside the Icon Naming Specification in the application package itself.(See http://standards.freedesktop.org/icon-theme-spec/icon-theme-spec-latest.html)

• make sure the application doesn’t choose icon names based on the metaphor an icon may have. Don’t use icon names for other purposes than they’re meant for.

We’d also like to have a discussion on the spec itself. It is not perfect and times have changed. Icon names may have to be added or removed. There will be problems, but we’re positive that these can be solved.

So to all developers maintaining apps for the GNOME platform: please update the icon names as soon as possible! If you need help or have any questions, feel free to drop by in the #tango or #gnome-art IRC channels.

Thanks!