Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I've never liked the Camera and Safari icons -- somehow my brain never associated "round thingie" with "taking a picture" and "compass" with "reading web pages" (remember the old Netscape light-tower? I've always thought that was so weird). In that sense, I kinda like the new Camera more than the old one (although Ian's suggestion to make it dynamic is great).

I agree 100000% on the Videos icon. It's a relic: when every Mac user was a pro video-maker using video-editing tools every day, I guess it made sense to keep it consistent. I don't come from that background, so that icon never felt natural; I agree that a "Play button" would be so much better.

The idea of making icons dynamic is great and would go some way towards compensating for the lack of real-time home-screen apps. Newsstand proves that it can be done, and Apple should probably use it a bit more, battery be damned. There is a risk in opening such an API to third parties, that developers will start blinkifying their icons to jump at you, transforming one's home screen in a giant flashy billboard; but it would certainly be a nice touch for homegrown system icons.

I completely disagree on the dynamic icons. When I want to play some music, I know I'm looking for a two-eighth-note icon on a pink-orange background, and I don't want that background to change to black cause I listened to Dark Side last.

One of the aims of dynamic icons is to avoid having to actually tap on them, if the required information is simple enough to be displayable in the icon itself (e.g. weather, stock). Apps that want to encourage launch could modify just half the icon, or a quarter, or none.

After reading the article, the last thing I wanted was dynamic icons. But your take on it makes sense.

I don't want 'photos' to show me the latest photo I took as that could have been days ago and now finding the photos app is really difficult.

But if just part of the icon changed to indicate something, like your stock folio position (without the red/green background idea) then it works both ways. The icon always looks generally the same - it's a graph - but it changes to indicate some data point that may save opening the app.

That said, how would the icons update if you don't open the app. Each app's developer would either have to send out an icon update notification or would have to provide some level of running the app on a regular basis to regenerate the icon.

I guess apps would have to provide a static function that returns an updated icon, which iOS would call every X minutes/hours. I don't think it'd be hard for developers, it's Apple who would have to do most of the job.

Ah, that is a good point. Retaining a significant amount of the original design probably goes a long way towards keeping the icon quickly-recognizable.

And that's the thing IMHO - to some people Safari is an established brand, just like Firefox with its red-and-blue icon, or Chrome. I am rarely aware of the fact that Safari is a compass. If Apple didn't want to build a brand, they should probably just change the label to "Internet" (sic).

And the new Safari icon throws that brand away, which means that everyone has to learn -again- that the skinny white compass means "browser". And that the icon is inconsistent with every use of the icon before. All things that could have been avoided while still making the icon flat.

Totally agree there would be problems to solve with 3rd party applications changing their icons. I was actually thinking Apple could do something smart about the intervals that the icons are allowed to change.

For example, the icon has free reign to update itself when the application is active. This would be useful for things like Newsstand, where the user purchasing new items affects the icon. But wouldn't need to be abused since the icon can't be seen while the application is active, so no one is going to blink it.

Then you could allow applications to update at a constrained interval when they aren't active as well. Except what if the amount of time required for the icon to update itself determined how often it happened. So an icon like "Clock" literally takes the tiniest sliver of time to update would be allowed to update more freely. (Clock is a bad example since even that is excessive, but you get the idea.)

Whereas an icon that needed to make an HTTP request to get new information to update itself would take 100's of milliseconds, and thus would be rate limited to only update maybe once an hour at most.

No idea if it could work technically, but it seems like an interesting solution.

There are security issues with letting 3rd party apps change their icons. What if one changed itself to look like Facebook, then pretended to be Facebook and asked you to login?

> remember the old Netscape light-tower?

No, got a link?

You're dead right about the Safari icon, though. I was always accidentally clicking it when I intended to load Maps.

I think he means Netscape Communicator, which used the lighthouse icon (where the metaphor has something to do with guiding you around in the dark?); Navigator had the boat wheel icon.

http://dialup.pacbell.net/images/16-4_22.gif

You're right. I think the lighthouse was also used in some version (or theme) of the animated icon in the top right corner, which was usually a big N [1].

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/93/Netscape_Navig...

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