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Summary says it all.
I don't know what is "free form" icon but I guess it's an icon of freeform project type, so passing to projects/ui.
Ugliness of the icon can be subjective but I don't like it either, there was already discussion on nbui (2/16/2007 - Jesse Glick) mailing list, but no result. Reassigning for comment from UI rep.
As an aside, the HELP documentation still shows the old (and much nicer) icon.
*** Issue 117630 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
It's not so much that it's ugly, but it gives the impression of indicating a bug and can therefore be misleading.
Jano, can the icon be changed e.g. to the Ant icon?
Created attachment 62071 [details] Proposed freeform project icon
Please comment the attached icon. We cannot use the Ant logo as it's too difficult to draw it in 16x16 pixels. The other option would be to use project specific icons (e.g. Java SE project icon - a cup - also for Java SE freeform project) or project specific icons with "ANT" sign on top.
I think it's too small to read the letters.
Letters are pretty small, plus "Ant" is not generally capitalized, plus UI guidelines say not to use words. The icon for Ant scripts (AntIcon.gif) manages to fit a simplified version of the Ant icon into 16x16, on top of an XML document no less. I would not object to an Ant badge on top of the usual project icons, if that can be made to look tolerable. Using the unbadged project-type-specific icons (coffee cup etc.) might confuse some users.
Created attachment 62359 [details] Freeform project icon proposal
See another try in the attachment. My favorite is #4 which is a combination of triangle from Ant logo and feather from Apache logo. No way to squeeze in an ant. Let me know which one you prefer, if any.
Nice! I like #4 also.
Let's go with #4. If there are no objections, Jano please clip it into a 16x16 and reassign to me.
Created attachment 62420 [details] New approved freeform icon.
Done. Also made sure JavaHelp used the new icon rather than stale copies. core-main #cb905580ac56
Integrated into 'main-golden', available in NB_Trunk_Production #241 build Changeset: http://hg.netbeans.org/main/rev/cb905580ac56 User: Jesse Glick <jglick@netbeans.org> Log: #117259: new freeform project icon. Also removing various obsolete copies of the icon.