Hi Peter,
[Peter Williams]
In my view, a normal stack has new items put on the top and a down arrow
would symbolize the push action. I.e. pushing an item down onto the top
of the stack.
This is a first point people may not agree on. In your view, the arrow
applies to the moving item. Another view is to apply the arrow to the
stack itself, an up-pointing arrow means that the stack grows (push), a
down-pointing arrow means that the stack shrinks (pop). That's what I
had in mind in the first place, although I am slowly moving to your own
view.
I think that this difference in views may be easily worked around. You
have to make it clearer in the icons what the arrows apply to - stack or
item. Your current icons aren't totally explicit. I am under the
impression that curved arrows would apply to items better, while
straight arrows would apply to the stack better, but maybe that's just
me. Also, if an arrow applies to an item, it should really start
from/point to this item.
[Peter Williams]
However, in quilt, the push operation is being applied to a series and
the new item is being pushed up onto the bottom of the the series so an
up arrow is the appropriate symbol.
This is the second point, and this one is inherent to quilt's own mixed
vocabulary. Again, both approaches are valid - as long as the icon is
explicit about which approach is used. Unfortunately I don't think this
is the case of your current icon.
[Peter Williams]
If you look at this in conjunction with the displayed patch list the up
arrow also makes sense as it depicts the movement of the pushed patch
from the greyed out unapplied patches at the bottom of the list to the
applied patches at the top of the list.
Am I the only one who sees this as logical?
It is logical, but needs to be explained before one will agree it is.
This doesn't make up for good icons, I fear.
Do you remember the sketches I sent to you in the early days? Basically,
it represented a (top-up) stack, push had a curved arrow pointing to the
top element, pop had a curved arrow leaving from the top element. I
think this was the correct approach, because it fulfills the two
criteria I listed above:
1* Curved arrows with one end inside the top element make it clear that
the arrow applies to the element and not to the stack.
2* Representing a raw stack (rather than attempting to make it look like
the series pane) makes it clear whether it is a top-up or top-down stack.
So I'd invite you to reconsider my original design.
Last, the colors you chose may be somewhat error prone. Push and pop are
not good and bad, using green and red doesn't make much sense to me. I
think I would go for more neutral colors, and I would use the same color
(blue maybe?) for both. They really are reciprocal, basic operations.
Hope that helps ;)
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