Hi, finally got hit with the icon browser disappearing so I installed the Icon Library app…
I’m not really sure what to say. It’s a major step backwards in usability. Like, it looks much nicer but it’s so much harder for me to use:
- I have some hand/wrist related trouble, so avoiding unnecessary clicks / scrolls (especially scrolls) is extremely important. But the app is designed as a massive linear list and it doesn’t respect Page Up / Page Down / Home / End for navigation either! If there was some kind of, I dunno, ‘index’, maybe a sidebar like the old icon browser, this would be much less of an issue–there’s plenty of room for it, and it would massively reduce the amount of inputs needed to find icons when you don’t know the id.
- Icons are displayed at 32px resolution, which is very pretty but not the resolution they will typically appear at in most contexts. The only way to know what an icon will look like at 16px is to manually click it…meaning you have to click it before you can know if it will actually work in your app! Now, I’m willing to believe this could come down to preference: Simply being able to change the default size that icons render at in the main view would help immensely without affecting folks who find the current res more useful.
As a developer, it can be extremely disheartening to have the UX of the tools you rely on suddenly worsen to this extent. I hope I haven’t come off as too angry here…at the end of the day, I really just want a way to look up icons without having to make tons of unnecessary inputs that put extra strain on my body.
I appreciate the search field, at any rate–it’s probably very efficient for looking up icons that you already know. But that’s not the app’s only use-case, having some way to handle discovery efficiently matters as well.