Appeal for Help: Avogadro Toolbar Icons
Monday, June 8. 2009
Over the last few days we have been working on improving the look and feel of the Avogadro user interface. We owe both Qt Software and the Oxygen icon team a lot for making this process a lot easier. Avogadro uses quite a few Oxygen icons that we have taken and in some cases adapted slightly.
The sliver of screen shot above shows our tools tool bar, along with the tool and display settings buttons. We are pretty happy with the majority of the icons, which are (from left to right) draw, navigate, bond-centric manipulation, atom centric manipulation, selection, auto rotation (animated rotation about axes), auto optimise (continuous optimisation of the molecule geometry), z-matrix, measure and align tools.
I would really welcome any suggestions and/or icon submissions for the auto rotate (the spinny thing near the centre), and the auto optimise (the wand with the circle) tools. I think auto rotate is OK, but it would be better if it conveyed more of a three dimensional rotation. The auto optimise wand is perhaps the worst as it does not suggest optimisation of the geometry, but I am not sure what would. Do any of you more creative types have any suggestions?
I also wonder if there are nice icons we could use for tool and display settings, or a way to make those buttons smaller without losing discoverability. I look forward to hearing people's thoughts. As this is what people see when they first open Avogadro we would like to make the interface as inviting and intuitive as possible.
Me
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1) You minimize the energy of the molecule. I've seen similar sorts of buttons with a big E and a downward pointing arrow.
2) You change the geometry of a molecule, so I've also seen something like a picture of water (3 atoms, reflect the geometry of a molecule).
3) I also thought about a lightning bolt -- energy, and quite clear graphically.
4) I picked the "wizard" icon from Oxygen -- magically get the right geometry.
But I'm not a graphic designer!
btw there is at least one icon you show there i just commited a new better version of it into oxygen...
to avoid dupication I ask you to use oxygen as a dependecy and not simpl grab icons from there, that way i can maintain your icons more than making them once and them forgueting all about them.
We appreciate the offer to design icons in the future. We'll definitely fill in the request form. We'd also like to have a mechanism to integrate changes in oxygen into our icons -- although we use Git and KDE is on SVN. We'll probably set up a cron job or something.
As for the "old" icons, there's only 3 icons from oxygen at the moment -- rotate, "autooptimize" and measure. I tried a few of the other oxygen alternatives (e.g., for "draw") and they didn't work as well for our toolbar.
if you want to get really fancy you could sketch a simple potential energy surface and have a downwards arrow point at the minimum.
I would also love to see the Optimize Geometry option in the Extention menu featured as a tool and/or keyboard shortcut. Perhaps as a "clean-up structure" feature.
I use it all the time.
Done and done. They're both in Git, although the "E" icon still leaves something to be desired.
(1) rotate and autorotate should be similar. The current rotate icon is lame. It looks like a diamond - it certainly doesn't convey any sense of what it does.
(2) atom centric and bond centric manip should be similar. Maybe take the "hand" from the bond centric and have it pointing to an angle in one case, and an atom in the other. Again, the current icons say nothing to me - I didn't remember what they were, even though I occassionly use the program.
(1) For measure, take the "A" from Avogadro and change it into an Angstrom A. The current icon is very busy.
(2) For align, check out Inkscape. It has several align icons.
The navigate tool is supposed to look like a compass or map diamond. It doesn't just rotate -- it translates, scales, and moves all around the molecule. So it's a bit different from the autorotate tool.
But all suggestions are welcome!