Feature request: classic icons

agoldenvein

The new "flat" or "line art" icons provide no useful information for the eyes to see anything at a glance. They must be looked at directly to discern what they are, rendering them less useful as visual aids.

It would be great to have the option to use classic icons which provide much better visual cues.

innovation1

Again, @jeapordy is helpful here (I promise I don't know this person!)

My own concern is the dull visibility of these Z7 icons. I appreciate minimalism, but the icons are perhaps too mere. They look like icon outlines/skeletons with empty space in between the lines. Unless you significantly embolden those "outlines", they might strain people's eyes.

For instance, compare the new web link icon and the new snapshot icon, particularly as they might appear in a long list in which both are listed in irregular order. It wouldn't be surprising if lots of users are squinting trying to pick out and keep their eyes on the link icons.

"It would be great to have the option to use classic icons which provide much better visual cues." Is this possible?

agoldenvein

Thank you @innovation1. I suspect the zotero devs don't like me because I have too many good points and get annoyed with them when they dismiss most of it.

agoldenvein

another one of those "trust us, we put a lot of thought into this" things I'm sure.

dstillman

@jeapordy: Yes, the problem is that you "have too many good points", not that you have a years-long history of posting aggressive, insulting, disruptive, and/or confused posts to these forums, insisting that nearly every complaint of yours is a glaring flaw and a sign that the people developing Zotero are clueless or incompetent.

We talk to thousands of people here every year — plenty of whom disagree with our decisions and, through civil discussions, help to shape the direction of the software — and no one else behaves the way you do.

In this case, your take here seems to be that our replacing the famfamfam icons from 2006 — a great but wildly overused and antiquated set of 16px bitmap icons — with a custom set of vector icons as part of a complete, dark-mode-supporting redesign across multiple platforms is some sort of imperious, user-hostile action. You can obviously prefer the old icons, which were ubiquitous for a reason, but your constant insistence that your personal preferences and priorities are the only correct ones, and that the people making the software couldn't possibly have well-grounded technical, functional, and aesthetic reasons for decisions they make, has gotten old. Your main goal seems to be to sow discord between Zotero developers and users in an otherwise largely friendly and cooperative forum, and we're done with it.

You said previously that, since Zotero was so unusable, you were going to switch to something else. For everyone's sake, perhaps it's time you do so.

A selection of your past comments, so others can see some of your "good points":

How is this still not a feature? [about auto-exporting saved searches, of all things]

How this is even a debate is beyond me, and I'm not really sure why this wouldn't be a feature since the very start. *sigh* I'll just go mess around with some plugins and see if I can get a properly functioning tag system that way.

Well there goes any hope I had of not pulling all my hair out. Thanks for letting me know. I think I'll just give up on zotero then.

What world do you live in? Do you think every computer user is mentally retarded or something? This is clearly a highly useful feature and the fact that you think "it doesn't make much sense" to you as a feature is absurd. [after being told that this was the first request for something in 10 years and given a possible reason why that might be]

It's really a mystery how Zotero has no dark mode. Have devs been living in the dark ages? [one reason? because many of the classic icons you currently want to switch back to would not work in dark mode]

This is such a basic functionality I don't understand how you can be skipping over this.

Glad to have brought this rather substantial bug to your attention. [about an already known issue, where someone else had to take the time to actually explain what you were trying to report]

In fact I find it hard to believe this decision was made and I wonder if whoever made that decision even uses Zotero for research. [about a core change in a beta that received months of intensive feedback, and to which another user responded that, in fact, they liked the change]

The zotero dev team seems to be very opinionated as to what we should be doing with their software, making decisions that, let's face it, often don't make sense [because I asked you not to share a block of undocumented, unmaintainable code to remove "wasted space" using an esoteric Mozilla mechanism — which caused even you to be confused about what was and wasn't part of the official Zotero design — in our user forums]

@innovation1: Sorry you got looped into this. We certainly won't be offering an option to revert to the previous icons, which don't work on a technical or design level, but you're welcome to start your own thread and share feedback.