RE: [ajdt-dev] A is for Aspect... or Annotation?

["Mik Kersten" <beatmik@xxxxxxx>]

Good catch Matt!  I'm so accustomed to ignoring the Eclipse icons that I
hadn't even noticed.  I just posted the following to the bug report:

Mik

-------------------
I suggest that the enums and annotations get a small "e" and "a", and that
icons for class, interface, and aspect continue to appear with an uppercase
"C", "I", and "A".  The latter are all types that define behavior, and as
such deserve a capital letter.  Annotations and enums are a less important
construct in a typical system's architecture and shouldn't encapsulate much
behavior, so it seems fitting to give them a lower-case letter.

The key thing in icon design is that it consistently communicates the
semantics of the thing they're trying to represent.  Unfortunately the
current JDT icons are already bad at this, and considerably worse than the
other Java IDEs.  And their overuse of color makes them very hard to extend
consistently by tools like AspectJ.  For example, how many developers
actually realize that the colors use a traffic light scheme for
accessibility?  Why does green mean both "class" and "public"?  Why is the
coloring of types redundant with the lettering, and yet there's not
indication of whether a type is generic?  I assume that it's too late to
change the color scheme.  So I'm glad that we're having this discussion on
the lettering scheme before it's too late :)  On that note, please note the
caveat with my proposal above.  If you ever decide to switch to "f" and "m"
for fields and methods the lowercase "e" and "a" will seem inconsistent
since those are types and not members.  But for AspectJ programmers that
would still be a far better scheme than getting forced to use a letter other
than "A" for aspect!
-------------------

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ajdt-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ajdt-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx] On
> Behalf Of Matt Chapman
> Sent: Tuesday, February 08, 2005 10:10 AM
> To: ajdt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [ajdt-dev] A is for Aspect... or Annotation?
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> As you may have noticed, in Eclipse 3.1M4 the JDT team have added an icon
> for annotations. It's no great surprise that they chose an "A" in a circle
> for this, similar to the "C" in a circle for classes. This means it is
> very similar to our icon for aspects -- it's blue instead of orange, but
> this similarity is potentially confusing to users, as they can appear in
> the same context.
> 
> Please see this bug for more details:
> https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=84431
> 
> Basically either they will change their icon, or we will have to change
> ours. One factor in this decision is the suitability of alternatives in
> each case. They have an '@' icon as an alternative, but they don't like
> the appearance of this in such a small icon. I'm not sure what we could
> use as an alternative, so my questions for you are:
> 
> 1. Can you suggest a way of making the '@' annotation icon clearer, or
> suggest an alternative icon for annotations?
> 
> 2. Can you suggest an alternative icon for aspects? If not a letter, then
> what sort of symbol? What does an aspect look like???
> 
> Any design has to be simple enough to fit in a 16x16 icon (including the
> containing circle).
> 
> --
> Matt Chapman, mchapman@xxxxxxxxxx
> AJDT Development, http://www.eclipse.org/ajdt
> 
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