On 09/26/2014 12:19 PM, Richard Hughes wrote:
At the moment applications have to provide an icon >= 32x32px in
size
to be included in the AppStream metadata and shown in the software
center. This is *tiny* on a HiDPI screen, so should I mandate that all
applications ship a 64x64 (and ideally, 128x128/64x64@2 also) icon for
the shell and gnome-software, or should I just pad+scale icons for the
HiDPI case and make them look ridiculous?
I'd say we should definitely include 128x128 icons in the metadata for
hidpi support -- one set of 64x64 icons for regular screens and another
set of 128x128 icons for hidpi screens.
I don't think we can _require_ that every app ship a 128x128 icon at
this point though. If they aren't available, we should just upscale the
low res icons for hidpi screens and have appstream-builder emit a
warning to make sure maintainers are aware that their apps are missing
important icons.
I don't think we can, or should, design a software center to
accept
the lowest common denominator when it comes to icon sizes; we're doing
really well now with AppData coverage[1] and I think we can raise the
quality of upstream and packaged icons in the same way.
My proposal would make 64x64 the smallest icon size we show in the
software center, and this will still be slightly blurry[2] in the
HiDPI case. This would affect 539 (over half of all desktop
applications) packaged in Fedora. It's clear we can't just do nothing,
as more and more devices will have HiDPI screens, and more and more
icons will look crazy small and fuzzy.
I don't think it's a good idea to mass-file 539 bugs, nor do I want to
contact 539 upstream maintainers. 127 packages only ship a 32x32 icon,
and that might be a good starting point for contacting upstreams or
filing bugs.
Yes, I'd say it's time to cut off apps with 32x32 icons. Padding 48x48
icons to 64x64 might still be OK though, especially since the number of
affected apps is quite large.
In any case, should emit warnings for missing 64x64 and 128x128 icons to
make sure maintainers know there's something missing and have time to
prepare.
--
Kalev