ADT ICON WISHLIST

We'd really like prettier icons, preferably in the general overall style of Eclipse's own icons. Most icons are 16x16. The Android Eclipse plugins have a lot of icons, but most of them were just quick placeholders drawn by developers while developing the feature.

This document lists the various areas that have icons. They are not necessarily listed in priority order. Also, some of the screenshots are a bit obsolete as features have continued developing.

Toolbar

The Eclipse toolbar has buttons for a few Android-related actions:

These are the icons that represent each type of view -- buttons, text fields, linear layouts, progress bars, relative layouts, etc.

These actions are:

Open SDK/AVD manager. One is used to download SDK components, the other to create Emulator configuration. We should split it in two differents panels, so 2 separate icons would work.
Create new Android Project
Create new Android Test Project
Create new Android XML File

Layout Editor

On the left is the palette showing the widgets. The palette has multiple modes, one showing a "live preview" of what the widgets actually look like, and another showing standard icons instead.

The icons were updated with some new placeholders a few months ago, but still could use nicer icons:

These icons are used in a couple of places:

The outline, as shown on the right
The palette itself, as shown on the left

For the palette, we could use larger icons, say 32x32 icons, but in the outline, we need to confine ourselves to 16x16 icons. Therefore, in the first round, we need 16x16 icons for all the widgets, and we can use these in the palette as well. Later, it would be great if we could offer larger icons in the palette, since we plan on having multiple views in the palette:

An icon + name view, as shown above - this would probably use 16x16 icons next to the text
An icon-only view, where the icons are packed into multiple icons per line. This is a more compact view, and we can afford to make the icons larger here to make them clearer and more distinguishable.
A preview-view, which shows the actual rendered versions of the widgets themselves, instead of icons (though for certain types of views, such as layouts, which have no graphics on their own, we may use icons.)

Icons for the views are the top priority. The full list of icons are exactly those views supported by Android, and the names here correspond to the Android classes:

WIDGETS	LAYOUTS
AnalogClock AutoCompleteTextView Button CheckBox CheckedTextView Chronometer DatePicker DigitalClock EditText Gallery GestureOverlayView ImageButton ImageView MultiAutoCompleteTextView ProgressBar QuickContactBadge RadioButton RatingBar SeekBar Spinner SurfaceView TextView TimePicker ToggleButton TwoLineListItem VideoView View ViewStub WebView ZoomButton ZoomControls	AbsoluteLayout DialerFilter ExpandableListView FrameLayout GridView HorizontalScrollView ImageSwitcher LinearLayout ListView MediaController RadioGroup RelativeLayout ScrollView SlidingDrawer TabHost TableLayout TableRow TabWidget TextSwitcher ViewAnimator ViewFlipper ViewSwitcher

In addition, there are 5 additional items that aren’t real Android View classes, but will also appear in the palette and/or outline:

“include” - this represents an <include> tag in the XML, which means you can include content from a different layout file and show it in place in the current layout. This is a bit like HTML’s “<frame>” concept
“merge” - this represents a <merge> tag in the XML, where you can declare multiple views without a parent; they will be added as direct children wherever this layout is inclued from
fragment - this is similar to includes
requestFocus - dropped on a view to have initial focus in the layout
custom view - this is not going to show up on the palette, but in the outline if the user has custom views (their own classes implementing View)

The layout editor has a toolbar shown in the original overview image, containing a handful of actions or state-buttons:

Zoom in, Zoom out, Zoom to 100%, Zoom to Fit, Emulate real size
Display extra margins around every view
Display outlines around every view
Toggle clipping mode

Finally, the context menu (and a few other places) has buttons for reordering elements - up and down buttons which need icons:

Layout Actions Bar

The layout editor has a new “layout bar” above the layout canvas where context-dependent actions are listed:

The set of icons needed for this layout bar currently contains:

Horizontal and Vertical orientation for linear layout
Fill width and fill height toggle buttons
Margins
Gravity
Distribute weights evenly
Edit Weight
Toggle Baseline alignment
Show Structure

DDMS

The tool has a DDMs perspective which needs a number of icons:

In the Device list, we need an icon to represent each device (which can also serve as the device view icon, as shown in the top left here).
There are two types of devices:

emulator
real devices (We don’t differenciate phone/tablets/googletv so we’ll need something somewhat generic

Then along the view toolbar we have icons for the following actions:

Debug the process
Enable/Disable (almost) real-time Heap info. As you see in the above screenshot right now it’s a toggle button. If it’s easier to have two different icons, we can make it work.
Dump HPROF file (this is a file containing memory allocation info)
Cause Garbage Collection
Enable/Disable real time Thread info. Same as the Heap info this could be two icons.
Start Method Profiling. This icon actually change to “Stop method profiling” once clicked. So we need two icons for start and stop.
Stop Process
Screen Capture / Screenshot

There are additional views which need a view icon:

the emulator control (shown here is the icon for the emulator device as mentioned above)
Additional views:

Heap
Threads
Allocation Tracker
File Explorer
Logcat

The logcat view was recently rewritten from scratch and may also need some new icons.

Editor

The text editor does not use many icons, except for in the case of code completion dialogs.

Here we need just one icon, to represent Android attributes. (We are currently using different icons for each property based on the first letter of the property, but we only need a single “property” icon):