developer.apple.com — "Icon genres help communicate what you can do with an application before you open it. Applications are classified by role?user applications, software utilities, and so on?and each category, or genre, has its own icon style."
Oct 4, 2006 View in Crawl 4
ignorantcowOct 5, 2006
5 years old, but constantly updated.Part of the infamous Apple Human Interface Guidelines... there are people who swear by this piece of document.
tizz66Oct 5, 2006
While I don't like the style of XP icons, they certainly keep things consistent like OSX does. The problem with Windows icons is they didn't update most of the old 16-bit icons for XP, so it looks rather rushed or half-assed. Originally they said they were going to update every icon for Vista, but then backtracked on it :(
mrblackthorneOct 5, 2006
The thing I like about Mac OS vs. Windows is not the icon consistency, but the consistency of keyboard shortcuts across applications. I can't tell you how many times I've been working in Windows and used a shortcut (CTRL-F, for instance, expecting a "Find" dialog to come up), and something completely different than what I expect happens. That's my biggest gripe about Windows applications...
aristotle0dudeOct 5, 2006
The iChat icon is similar the stickies icon in that it does not require a tool. What tool would you suggest for a chat program? The bubble represents a speech bubble like in a comic book and it mimics the speech bubbles in the conversation windows.The stamp for the mail.app is also similar to the stickies icon and it represents mail which is the name of the email program. Do you have a better suggestion?
Closed AccountOct 6, 2006
Nifty. There's a lot of logic to these icons that one takes for granted.