A new icon for BeMines

I've been working on a fork of BeMines on HaikuArchives to merge in the Haiku theme I did for it so I can then do a pull request and have it merged back in, and decided to also do an icon for it. I'd considered using the mine icon I'd made for Minesweeper, but didn't want to contribute even more to the existing confusion between BeMines and Minesweeper, so I made a custom version of the icon for BeMines.

• Download the BeMines HVIF icon here.

Hopefully the bright red color with the Be "eyear" logo on it will make it easily recognizable as a different app from Minesweeper.

I had to do some reading about resources and .rdef files, but I think I have the icon added to the rdef file that I created from the existing .rsrc file (the old Be binary format) by using rc -d BeMines.rsrc which output BeMines.rdef. Unfortunately I then ran into a compilation error when trying to compile BeMines to test my changes. Hopefully that gets fixed soon and I can move forward with adding my theme and icon.

UPDATE: the compilation bug had already been fixed in Haikuports by Pulkomandy, but hadn't been pushed upstream to HaikuArchives, despite pulling from that source for its recipe and applying the patch there before compiling. So diver upstreamed Pulkomandy's patch and I then forked the HaikuArchives/BeMines git repo, applied my changes (added my theme, icon, etc), and put in a pull request. It was a learning experience but not much of a fun one by the end... git and I aren't friends. ;)

Some miscellaneous icon updates

I decided to devote a post to some miscellaneous icons I've updated, some recent and some a few years ago now. Just to be clear, I didn't originally do most of these icons. They were either from the app directly (BePDF), from data/artwork/icons/ in the Haiku source tree, or from Zumi's icon collection. I simply cleaned them up or reworked most them. Credit should go to the original authors for their work.

First let's address the FontBoy icon. I noticed recently that work had resumed on FontBoy and wondered if they were going to use the new hvif icon I'd done for it back in 2012, and decided to check it out... only to notice that humdinger had redone another new hvif icon for it, apparently unaware I'd already done one. I polished mine up a little further and will offer it here. Maybe it's just me but I'm a little partial to mine. ;)

The original Be raster version is on top, then the current FontBoy icon by humdinger in the middle, and finally my FontBoy icon on the bottom.

• Download the FontBoy icon here

For all the remaining icons on this page the original icon will be on the left side and my "fixed" version will be on the right side.

Next we have the TARDIS icon. This one was hanging out in the data/artwork/icons folder in the Haiku source tree, and I felt it could use a little polishing (right side windows, light beams, highlights, and shadow).

• Download the TARDIS icon here

Then we have the BePDF bee icon that needs to have the Adobe PDF logo removed from it. This one might be able to use a little tweaking to the legs to make them more visible irrespective of the background color?

• Download the BePDF icon here

Next are the two USB icons from data/artwork/icons. They looked a little skewed to me, so I cleaned up the hvif files for them (removing unused shapes, paths, and styles) and added a bit of polishing to them as well. A little added shadowing, enlarged holes, and angle correction on the male connector, and tweaked the cords a bit. (Also made the USB logo match on both.)

• Download the USB Beige icon here
• Download the USB Black icon here

Next is the Hand icon. For this one I did quite a bit of cleaning up "under the hood" so to speak. The border around the hand for example had been created as a separate path/shape rather than as a stroke on the existing path around the hand. There were also quite a lot of extra points in the path. So I cleaned a bunch of that up and reduced the file size by over 20%, then used that freed up room to add in a bit of "shine" on the wrist and thumb to make it more like the original again.

• Download the Hand icon here

Then I took the Coretex app icon and added it to the hand (merging the shadow, and removing the shapes and path data under the Coretex icon to reduce file size) to create a CoretexAddOnHost icon to replace the old Be raster icon still in use by the system. I'm not sure if this is the correct icon to use for this? I need to find out if this works, or if I need to create a version that matches the raster one... one of the devs will need to enlighten me on this one.

• Download the CoretexAddOnHost icon here

Finally we have some icons from Zumi's great icon collection.

First are some GTalk icons. These I barely tweaked. Just changed the large G to be a little more solid and similar to the official Google logo, made it not overlap the balloon, and then tweaked yellow to make it a bit more visible and fixed the bottom right borders of the balloons where they got a bit too thin.

• Download the GTalk G icon here
• Download the GTalk icon here

And last, but not least, I wanted to make Zumi's frogs actually look like frogs, so I redid the original 2 icons to be more frog-like, and then added yet another color variation to match the blue poison dart frog that used to be used a few years ago as the logo for the Java based bittorrent client called Azureus. The company changed its name and that of its software platform in part in 2006, then more fully in 2008 (although the client engine apparently still retains the name), and the logo is now simply a monochrome frog silhouette rather than the more specific blue poison dart frog it used to be.

• Download the Frog icon here
• Download the Frog Alt Color icon here
• Download the Frog Azureus Color icon here

A Haiku Minesweeper update and a theme for BeMines

Since my original mockups there's been at least some progress on Minesweeper in general. It's been added to the HaikuArchives at least.

• https://github.com/HaikuArchives/Minesweeper

A new ticket has been created on the github repo version referring to my old ticket on trac discussing my ideas for the Haiku style enhancements.

• https://github.com/HaikuArchives/Minesweeper/issues/8

Let's have a look at the updated style work I've done recently, including a preview of both the new icons I've created, and the couple from Zumi's excellent icon collection that I'd like to use in the app.

• You can download all the associated hvif files in a zip file here.

The emoticons and clock icon are from Zumi's collection and the rest were created by me.

While I was at it, I also created a similar theme based on that style for Darkwyrm's BeMines. This is just a bitmap based theme based on the mockups work I was doing for the actual Minesweeper style work.

• You can download that theme zip file here.

While I was working on that theme I noticed an interesting bug in BeMines... two related bugs actually. First, the game finishes when all flags are placed, not when all tiles are cleared as in the Windows version I'm familiar with. This allows instances where you can basically cheat by guessing flag placements in a few final squares where you might otherwise be forced to guess at clearing a tile at the risk of hitting a mine. This leads to another side effect bug where clearing every tile except the mine location doesn't finish the map. You have to manually place the final flag to finish the map, again unlike the Windows version I'm familiar with, and unlike the Haiku Minesweeper version at the top of this post which functions exactly as I recall in the Windows version.

Visualization of Haiku git repository activity - January 8th, 2015 update

Here is another update of the Haiku git repository Gource visualization. The last one I did of this was well over 2 years ago, and I've been meaning to do a new and improved one ever since.

For convenience I'll include the full description here;

Visualization of activity on the Haiku OS git repository done with Gource.

https://www.haiku-os.org/ http://code.google.com/p/gource/ https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/building/get-source-git

I used a combination of the Gravatar script ( http://code.google.com/p/gource/wiki/GravatarExample ) and some custom done icons for some of the users, replaced the default user icon with a modified "People" icon from Haiku, dropped in the Haiku logo, and did a number of other tweaks.

Command line:

gource --load-config gource.cfg -r 25 -o gource.ppm

Encoding line:

ffmpeg -y -i audio.mp3 -vcodec ppm -r 88 -f image2pipe -i gource.ppm -vcodec mpeg4 -r 29.97 -preset veryslow -q:v 1 -threads 8 -b:v 10000k -bf 0 -comp_duration 204 -ac 2 -acodec copy gource.mp4

Config file:

[display]
viewport=1920x1080

[gource]
auto-skip-seconds=0.01
camera-mode=overview
default-user-image=person.png
font-size=24 font-colour=ff7600
hide=progress,filenames
highlight-colour=ffd300
dir-colour=d5eaff
highlight-users=true
key=true
logo=HAIKU logo - white on transparent - small.png
seconds-per-day=0.01
stop-at-end=true
user-image-dir=.git/avatar/
user-scale=8
max-user-speed=100
bloom-intensity=0.50
bloom-multiplier=0.75


As you might notice, I did this one in full 1080p this time around and the video quality came out far better.

The music in the video is from "Flight of the Bumblebee", which seemed perfectly fitting to the frenetic pace of the development shown in the video.

Using the actual Thumbnail attribute in Tracker

While working on my earlier post about updating the Thumbnail application, I was reminded of a nagging irritation I've had not only since I started using Thumbnail, but especially since larger icon size options in tracker were added by John Scipione back in hrev44422.

In essence the problem is that currently Tracker uses either the BEOS:M:STD_ICON or BEOS:L:STD_ICON attributes to display the icon for the file in Tracker. But since these icons come from more than 15 years ago back in the BeOS days, those icon sizes are 16px and 32px respectively, on top of being dithered. (See the "GetIcon(), SetIcon(), GetTrackerIcon()" section of the BNodeInfo page in the BeBook for more info.)

While those may not look too terrible at those very small sizes (and even that is definitely arguable), the problem is that the 32px BEOS:L:STD_ICON is the biggest one we have to work with when it comes to showing a preview of the actual image for image files. So this gets scaled up double for even 64px sizes, triple for 96px, and quadruple for 128px sizes.

You can see the result of this for 96px sizes in the image below showing the current way it's done. And that's not even the worst example.

Now, what I noticed while tweaking the binaries for that earlier release was that there is also a GRAFX:Thumbnail attribute set, which includes a high quality (up to) 96px actual thumbnail version of the image. I kept finding myself wondering why the heck Tracker refused to use this far superior thumbnail even when I was using the largest icon size options.

I haven't gotten an answer to that question yet... as to whether or not it just hasn't been coded yet... or there is actually an ideological reason why not to do it, or even something architectural preventing it.

In the meantime, here are two images... the first of the way it is now... and the second showing how it could look if Tracker used the GRAFX:Thumbnail attribute instead.

Current Tracker settings

Mockup of using Thumbnail attribute

Some tweaks and updates to Thumbnail

Awhile back I ran across a handy little program called Thumbnail that could be used to create embedded thumbnails (and other info, like image dimensions) in the resources of image files so that, for instance, the image icons would actually show little previews of the image itself, and you could sort the images by dimensions, etc.

Unfortunately the way it handled the image dimension attributes was a bit different than what is used by Tracker in Haiku today. So Haiku user bbjimmy did some manual tweaks to the app's resources (hex editing the binaries using DiskProbe) and brought it a little more up to date to be functional with Haiku today.

Inspired by this, I decided to also create a new HVIF icon for it: Thumbnail.hvif.zip

I also think it would be great to be able to get our hands on the original source code, but thus far I haven't had any luck tracking down the author, Thorsten Seitz, who wrote the app around 15 years ago. :(

So in the meantime, you can download the file(s) here:

Here is the original package that was made for BeOS R4. This doesn't work quite right with Haiku.

Here is the updated version for Haiku which includes the English and German versions, updated documentation, and the HVIF icon for it.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

I had a few other thoughts while putting this new package together, but I'll save them for another post. ;)

A Haiku style makeover for the classic Minesweeper

This all started with me noticing an email on the Haiku development mailing list mentioning a "Tri-Edge AI" having done a Minesweeper game as part of the Google Code-In 2012.

After downloading, compiling, and testing it out in Haiku, I felt like seeing if I could give it an improved Haiku look and feel. I also had a number of ideas on how it might be improved as a demo and game for Haiku, since it is small enough that it seems like it could be an excellent demonstration of how to program a good looking program sticking closely to the Haiku look, feel, and way of programming using the Haiku API.

For example, instead of using PNG image resources I thought we could use HVIF icons along with the native Haiku API to draw the game board and graphics in the game. This should allow us to scale the game board to make it more easily seen for the visually impaired, reduce the size of the over-all package (by reducing the graphic resources by ~75%), and further serve as a good demo of using the Haiku API to its fullest.

I also question the need for some of the added features in Tri-Edge AI's version of the game, since the goal here is to basically develop a modern Haiku version of the original BeOS Minesweeper game that was bundled with the OS. That game lacked animations, sound effects, etc... and as such for a small bundled application I think those things are too much for the intended goal. I'd strip it down to the more basic functionality and put the extra work into smoothing the aesthetics in the Haiku style, giving it some flexibility of the type you find in the Layout Kit (leveraging the API and native widgets, font rendering, etc rather than brute forcing everything with images), the use of HVIF vector icons for saving file size and allowing flexibility in displaying the images, and so on. Make it really illustrate what the Haiku API and associated technologies have to offer while still sticking very close to the functionality and feel of the original BeOS game.

(I'm not trying to knock some of the additions. For instance I think the little explosions are cute, and sounds could be neat... but think they're just overkill for a basic demo/game and too much of a departure from the original for a bundled demo/game.)

I've done up 3 mockups so far of the "in game", "game over", and "game won" screens to give an idea of the look/feel I'm going for.

The sad part is that I don't have the programming skills yet to accomplish this myself, so I'm hoping that someone who does can implement the changes. ;) heh

I can certainly contribute to the design, and I can do the icons etc... I just can't write more than the most super beginner level basic C++.

I've written up an enhancement ticket on the Haiku development tracker for later official reference.

UPDATE: Check out my updated designs for this in my post titled "A Haiku Minesweeper update and a theme for BeMines".