[linux-audio-user] it's so quiet...

[tim hall]

Last Tuesday 20 July 2004 08:24, Russell Hanaghan was like:
> On Mon, 2004-07-19 at 21:12, Jan Depner wrote:
> > Is that a European fish or an African fish????
> >
> > Jan
>
> Oh man! You ask ALL the tough questions! ;)  It was kind of a follow on
> from the Elephant=Loud & Fish=quiet thingy by Arnold.
>
> I was just having a jab at the kazillion or so posts on the wacky
> widgetness (slobs vs liders) and suddenly I created a
> ....er...um...."Fish"?? Ain't we creative!?
>
> R~
>
> > On Mon, 2004-07-19 at 22:47, Russell Hanaghan wrote:
> > > Did every one take a vacation?
> > >
> > > It's so quiet you can hear a fish drop!
> > >
> > > :)

One of the visual hallmarks of a GNU system - and one of the things that I 
find attractive about it is the plethora of cute anthropomorphic animals used 
as logos and icons. Each of these creatures has a kind of totemic association 
in the context of GNU software ( like bit-beasts ). Therefore we should take 
some care when assigning cuddly cartoon creatures to functions.

[I'll bring this thread round to a semi-serious point in a minute, just keep 
reading ;-]

The elephant is clearly already the emblem of postgresql, the rest are 
relatively free agents. We don't have much in the way of friendly fish icons, 
unless you count PHP?s porpoise (not a fish), Terrapin has already been used 
although not in a GNU context. I think rabbits are still free range.

There is generally, a lack of musical icons - both for applications and 
functions and as there is a precedent for such we should reserve our animal 
friends for application mascots. Although I'm expressing it rather 
flippantly, I think there is some important psychology behind how we use 
visual representations. Hence the passion behind the 'knobs vs sliders' 
debate.

I don't think this is a Big Deal, but it is possibly worth some light-hearted 
consideration ;-)

cheers

tim hall