Windows tray icon looks like the Skype one

[bersbersbers]

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Expected behaviour

I look at the Windows system tray and easily recognize the Nextcloud icon.

Actual behaviour

I look at the Windows system tray and every. single. time. I have to look twice to tell which icon is Nextcloud and which one is Skype.

Monochrome icons help a bit, but they are hard to distinguish from the other Windows icons (volume, network, power etc.)

[camilasan]

What do you think @jancborchardt?

[ghost]

Not only Skype. We use Lexware Financial Office and there is a helperprocess which has exactly the same icon as NC Desktop. So more NC-Design would suite the Desktop well.

[HammyHavoc]

It might be nice to be able to upload an icon to your Nextcloud instance via the admin and white-label it with your company logo.

[jancborchardt]

There has been a ton of discussion which went into the tray icons, including New sync state icons nextcloud/client_theming#196 and Add new sync state icons #416.

Unfortunately due to our logo form which is rather wide, it just doesn’t work very well having the logo and the sync state there at the same time in this tiny space, especially at that small size.

It might be nice to be able to upload an icon to your Nextcloud instance via the admin and white-label it with your company logo.

@HammyHavoc @robinkooli @spacegaier exactly this is already possible for customers via our branding options :) https://nextcloud.com/branding/

[ghost]

@jancborchardt I see the problem, but the issue primarly is the -icon. Alle other icons are fine.

In the mean time I have another software which is using this kind of an icon. It seems to get more and more popular to use such a form. So the question still exits: is it possible to get this particular icon more nc-ish?

[johkoenig]

A solution to this problem would be to use the blue Nextcloud icon in the tray and then to attach it with a small overlay depending on the state. This is how OneDrive behaves.
Some examples (sorry for bad quality, images are from google image search):
Failure:
Offline:

[elsiehupp]

I’ve been meaning to weigh in on the issues of UI icons (not so much the application icon). If Nextcloud Desktop were to use the Freedesktop.org Icon Theme Specification (which Qt natively supports) and the Freedesktop.org Standard Icon Names, it would facilitate platform-specific UX theming and help the application feel more native.

Linux aside, Microsoft has both Fluent System Icons and Segoe Icons, while Apple has SF Symbols. Microsoft’s Fluent Icons are under the MIT License, so if I understand correctly they could be redistributed as part of the Nextcloud client code, but Segoe and SF Symbols would be linked through the operating systems’ APIs due to licensing. In both cases, a translation layer exposing the native icon themes as XDG icon themes would make sense to have as a separately distributable library for the benefit of other application developers, though to be honest that undertaking seems more like something Qt itself should pursue.

On Linux, the main XDG icon themes to target would probably be Adwaita and Breeze. I don’t know to what extent Adwaita and Breeze use compatible icon names beyond the base specification, though. One nice thing with the XDG icon specification as implemented in both GTK and Qt is that it can specify fallbacks, such that if an icon doesn’t exist in the primary theme a different icon can be used. In this way, Nextcloud Desktop could, for example, include variations of Adwaita and/or Breeze within the distributable so that themable UI icons would have reasonable defaults.

Probably the safest way to start with theming would be to remap the existing icon names onto the Freedesktop.org Icon Naming Specification and port the existing icon theme to the Freedektop.org Icon Theme Specification. Once this is done, Nextcloud Desktop could start adding whitelisted platform-specific icon themes that can be thoroughly tested. Ultimately allowing arbitrary icon themes seems like it should be a configurable option for the Linux version, but it should be disabled by default.

If any major Linux distributions that don’t use Adwaita or Breeze by default want Nextcloud to natively support their icon theme, it would be relatively easy for the distribution’s maintainers to make sure that their theme includes all of the necessary icons and then add the theme to Nextcloud’s whitelist.

Anyway, I should probably put this in its own issue. I’ve been looking into this for a while, now, and I have plenty of thoughts.