boakes.org

Good PNG support is an important thing to nail since it has a significant effect on the sheen of the application. The alpha transparency mechanism currently supported by Eclipse already works under certain circumstances, but not all, and until it does, developers are stuck with the clunky transparency offered by GIF.

In the mean time, any partial migration to PNG necessitates the inclusion of some hacky workarounds in order to display different icons for different parts of the UI, something which is not desirable because there’s wasted time both in hacking it and unhacking it later.

Robust PNG support is also important because it will help pave the way for SVG based icons. SVG icons can include complex transparencies and PNG is the most likely intermediary format for icons to be converted to before being blatted to the screen.

SVG based icons are important because they are scaleable - resulting in Eclipse UI components that can be appropriately rendered, regardless of screen size or resolution. This will have an effect on the uptake of the Eclipse RCP for small screen (read: mobile) devices as well as other specialist uses.

With any luck, bug 35040 will make it into the next Eclipse release since it’s now in the top 10 most voted for bugs, and seems to be moving up the list.

Add your vote here. Note: to do this you need a buzgilla account, you can create one here.