New Update Icons in Ubuntu 8.04 - Adventures in Switching to Linux

Saturday, May 10, 2008

New Update Icons in Ubuntu 8.04

Have you noticed the new update icons in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron)? The old update icon was an orange box with what looks like a white sun in the middle. It was OK. The new icon is a nine sided star (enneagram) with a white arrow pointing down. I have also noticed a new "Critical Updates" icon that I never saw in Ubuntu 7.10 (Was it there and I just never saw it?). The critical updates icon is a big red down arrow with an exclamation mark in the middle.

I really do like the new icons. They look a lot more defined and get your attention better. I especially like that there is an icon that indicates critical updates now too. I do wish the critical updates icon was more like the regular update icon though. They are so different that it is not obvious at first that they both signify updates are available. Maybe Ubuntu could use the same icon and change the color and/or the little icon inside the icon.

My one other beef with the new update icon is it also looks like the application crash notification icon. I think it is a bad idea to make both of those icons look so similar. Check out the image below to see what I mean.

The new update icons in Ubuntu
(click on the image for the full size version,
PNGs don't resize well!)
Ubuntu 8.04 Update Icons
So what do you think of the new icons?

1 comment:

Gilbert said...

Good idea to indicate what kind of updates are waiting by showing a different icon for normal or critical updates. However I wish that the icons were made with transparent backgrounds as they look really ugly if you have a dark colour as the panel's background. it's just a minor thing which I can easily look over considering it's a new feature :)