Wrong background colour for nautilus icon in Unity launcher

[Chow Loong Jin]

  affects ubuntu/unity

As you can see in the screenshot, the nautilus icon appears to have a maroon-ish
background instead of the more appropriate blue in this case.

This is in Raring's Unity, and the icon theme in use is "elementary-mono-dark".

--
Kind regards,
Loong Jin

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Joschi Poschi (joschiposchi)]

I'm also facing this bug in Raring Ringtail.

Also I get a wrong background color for Update Manager (see screenshot).

I'm using Faenza icon set, so the bug seems to be independent from the icon set.

[Debabrata Das (debabrata)]

As I mentioned in my duplicate bug filling (Bug #1176478), this issue is affecting all three new icons (nautilus, software center & software updater) introduced in Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail).

[John Lea (johnlea)]

The background colours are correct for the default officially supported icon set so marking this bug invalid. In 13.04 it is possible for applications to specify a specific colour for their tile. What is happening here is that these three apps have specified a specific colour, so that if you want to modify the tile colour you will need to either remove the specific colour reference (with will switch on the fallback average colour tile colourisation) change the specific colour reference.

[Joschi Poschi (joschiposchi)]

I don't get the reason why it's invalid. Because we don't use the default icons so our icons don't meet the hardcoded colours?
So it's a Nautilus/Software Center/Software Updater bug? Or who is hardcoding the colours?
To me it seems not so very logical to use fixed colours for certain application icons as I think many people use a different icon set than the default one.

Please tell the people that don't know as much as you about the colour references where one could change/deactivate the specific colour. What "title" are you mentioning?

[John Lea (johnlea)]

@joschiposchi; it is invalid because there is specific functionality already in Ubuntu that enables applications to select exactly the tile colour they want. The colours that are currently used for these 3 applications are the colours that were chosen by visual design. The reason I have marked this bug as invalid is because a) the current colours are the correct default colours and b) there is specific functionality already in Ubuntu that enables apps to select any tile colour they like.

[John Lea (johnlea)]

@joschiposchi; choosing the app icon and tile colour is up to the app author. Of course with open source software you are free to modify both of these things if you like. However this is not something to be exposed to non-technical users.

[Chow Loong Jin (hyperair)]

On 15/05/2013 18:30, John Lea wrote:
> @joschiposchi; choosing the app icon and tile colour is up to the app
> author. Of course with open source software you are free to modify both
> of these things if you like. However this is not something to be
> exposed to non-technical users.

So basically you're saying that this is hardcoded in nautilus to be a
reddish-brown shade, even while allowing the icon to be overridden by the icon
theme? If this behaviour isn't broken, I don't know what broken is.

Well, for now let's just redirect the bug to nautilus -- if Unity's just
allowing applications to specify what colour their icons should be, then it's
Unity's fault.

--
Kind regards,
Loong Jin

[Chow Loong Jin (hyperair)]

On 15/05/2013 23:21, Chow Loong Jin wrote:
> [...]
> Well, for now let's just redirect the bug to nautilus -- if Unity's just
> allowing applications to specify what colour their icons should be, then it's
> Unity's fault.

*not* Unity's fault, I mean.

I just had a quick chat with seb128 on the issue, and it looks like it's
supposed to be a temporary hack until the average-icon-colour algorithm gets fixed.

References:
- Bug #962120 (comment #4)
- Bug #1081691 (comment #23)

But really, encoding the background colour of the tile into the .desktop file
has to be *the* hackiest solution ever. Desktop files are recommended to only
specify the icon name so that it can be resolved according to the users' icon
theme. Icon-theme-specific data really does not belong in the .desktop file.

I get that it's not easy (and not possible?) to add custom metadata to .png's,
so how about a solution involving an out-of-band file placed beside the icon
like $icon_name.png.unity-hint that Unity can parse for hints?

--
Kind regards,
Loong Jin

[John Lea (johnlea)]

@hyperair; In Unity 8 we will probably be completely removing average-icon-colour algorithm and either:
- forcing all applications to pick a specific colour.
- Not having the concept of a Launcher tile background at all, and just displaying an icon that covers the whole tile. If we take this approach we would then use shaders on the icon for the launching 'pulse' effect, etc...

Agreed that defining the tile background colour in the .desktop file is a hackey solution, but not sure what mechanism will be proposed for Unity 8. However there is a very high probability the average-icon-colour algorithm will be removed from the next version of Unity.

[Chow Loong Jin (hyperair)]

On 16/05/2013 16:47, John Lea wrote:
> @hyperair; In Unity 8 we will probably be completely removing
> average-icon-colour algorithm and either:
> - forcing all applications to pick a specific colour.

So what happens to applications which don't? You can't expect all upstreams to
bother about making Unity-specific changes, and it'll just look bad if their
launcher icons look bad in Unity.

> - Not having the concept of a Launcher tile background at all, and just
> displaying an icon that covers the whole tile. If we take this approach we
> would then use shaders on the icon for the launching 'pulse' effect, etc...

What about the filled-tile effect when applications are running? The small
triangles aren't very visible with this effect enabled, and it still requires a
tile background colour.

> [...]

--
Kind regards,
Loong Jin

[Joschi Poschi (joschiposchi)]

You can for example open the "update-manager.desktop" file located either in /usr/share/applications/ or ~/.local/share/applications with gedit and delete the line starting with "X-Unity-IconBackgroundColor". This gives you back the chameleonic colour for the specific launcher icon.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.