Today's project was a Java icon for Haiku. I tweaked my earlier version and made the steam a bit more opaque and removed it from the 16x16px view. Hopefully the devs like it.
Showing posts with label icons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label icons. Show all posts
Sunday, March 1, 2015
Saturday, February 7, 2015
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.
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. ;)
Thursday, February 5, 2015
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.
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).
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?
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, March 10, 2013
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. ;)
Friday, August 10, 2012
New red/green color blind friendly Pe icons
Well, for those who are red/green colorblind like I am at least. ;)
Since I started using Haiku this has always been an irritation to me and up until very recently I didn't even have a clue that the StyleEdit and Pe icons were actually different colors. I thought they were both yellow.
Only when I finally got fed up with confusing the two did I finally take a very close look in preparation to change the color and notice that the Pe icons were in fact green and not yellow.
Here's some of the description from a bug report I filed on the issue;
For people who have red/green deficient vision, the icons for StyleEdit and Pe are almost indistinguishable, especially at smaller sizes where the slight difference in the pencils becomes less pronounces and the overall color of the icon (from the paper) becomes the major visually distinguishing factor.
This is the most common form of color blindness, affecting from 7% to 10% of males.
These 2 links give you an idea how the icons look to color deficient folks. (For me the lightness/darkness is even less pronounced and the papers appear essentially identical.)
So to make a very clear differentiation, I redid both the color of the paper and the writing on the paper (borrowing from the XEmacs hvif icon).
More recently I started working on the Doom 3 source code here on Haiku and again got irritated by not being able to tell the file type icons apart, so I made up new icons for the different Pe filetypes using a variation on the main Pe application icon. So the little document papers have pseudo-code style writing on them instead of the plain lines of a normal text document.
Yes I know about the iodoom3 project. The problem for me was that the iodoom3 source currently is in much worse shape than the albertz repo. Albertz and others already did a lot of work to add things like FreeBSD support and clean up a lot of the numerous warnings in the code and generally make it a lot nicer to work with. So that is the code I decided to work with.
I then used the FileTypes application to drag and drop replace the icons for the main Pe file types.
Just drag the new icon onto the icon preview in the Icon box and it will replace that icon for the selected file type.
Once I'd done that, I could easily distinguish StyleEdit, Pe, and unassociated file types in Tracker and I was a very happy camper.
And last but not least, here are the actual HVIF Pe icons: Download PeIcons2.zip
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)