Major Step Forward For SVG in the Desktop

Ur@eus writes "SVG the w3c format for Scalable Vector Graphics is seen as many as the future of desktop icons as it allows for scaling icons etc. without loss of quality. Dominic Lachowicz has been working hard on fixing bugs in librsvg over the last few days. The result is that librsvg now renders all available SVG icons perfectly. Not only do it render them, but it renders them faster than libpng renders the same images in png format. Together with the gdkpixbuf plugin librsvg offer it means GNOME 2.2 will be able to use SVG images not only for icons or desktop backgrounds, but also for the GUI widgets themselves and the graphics of the window manager. Dom's announcement can be found on the librsvg mailinglist. The librsvg site also offer a GNOME 2.2 metatheme using mostly SVG icons including a nice screenshot."

Comments

Stateful Icons?

[Masem]

Could this also be used to build 'icons' with stateful representations of the objects they are supposed to represent? For example, instead of just 'empty' and 'full' for Trash/Recycle, could you have folders icons that have 'empty', 'sparse', 'full', and 'stuffed'? Or icons that reflect the read/write nature of the folder with respect to the user? Or even more down the road, icons that aren't pointing directly to files/folders but as system objects (as say down the /dev tree), such as a clock, a CPU meter, etc...? Yes, we have that functionality through many means, such as WM's dockapps, or by using shaped windows to simulate that. But if you look at the Mac OS X Dock, or the various things you can do with ObjectDesktop by StarDock systems on the Windows side, they reflect the ideas that I'm thining about here. Sure, it's nice to have, in WM , the status of my system along the right side easy to see, but I'd like it better if I could have a better control over how those are appearing on my desktop, and if I could make them true icons, draggable and placable whereever I want, that would be great.

Even more so, using XML and SVG, it would be very easy to create additional icons without a lot of programming behind it. You may need to a SAX reader to take the stateful information into some form, but after that, it's just XSLT transformations into SVG, and voila, you have an easy way to make cool meters/icons.

Re: Stateful Icons?

[Anonymous Coward]

This functionality is already in Nautilus. They're called emblems. You have read-only emblems, Music Folder emblems, etc. It supports both PNG and SVG emblems.

Maybe Konq has this too, but i haven't used it in i-dont-know-how-many years, so i dunno if it does.

Re: Stateful Icons?

[IamTheRealMike]

Personally I suspect there's not a great deal of point in making icons vector: 128x128x32 with a decent scaling algorithm (and an optional set of pre-scaled images at smaller sizes) seems to cover pretty much everything.

Covers everything at this time. Max resolutions have gone up year on year, but most people don't use the full capabilities of their card/monitor because the screen elements become too small. So having a resolution independant desktop would be a good way of solving that issue (though obviously you still get these issues with the web).

Re: Stateful Icons?

[Ed Avis]

It's a step towards what we should have had long ago: a desktop where you don't need to know what resolution it's running at, things are just scaled to the correct size. It's crazy that changing to a higher resolution display (eg from 800x600 to 1024x768 on the same monitor) makes all the window decorations and icons smaller. Fonts are supposed to remain the same size, but often they don't.

Obviously for really low resolutions the scale might need to be increased to keep things readable, but a 3200x2400 desktop should look identical to 800x600 except for increased sharpness and detail. (You can still choose really tiny icons if you want them, of course.)

Re:Just more OSX themes.

[rseuhs]

Unlike most eye candy, this makes the desktop faster, so I don't see anything wrong about it.

Also, the more it will be used, the faster it will hopefully become available in browsers out of the box so we can finally ditch flash...

Re:odd

[jordan_a]

Icons are only a small part of what SVG Graphics are about. However being the most common images used on the desktop it is a logical starting point for SVG graphics.

great lib name

[RobertTaylor]

gdkpixbuf

That looks like someone headbutted the keyboard...

Re:great lib name

[Anonvmous Coward]

"gdkpixbuf
That looks like someone headbutted the keyboard..."

He had his cat name it.

Once again... /.'ers rally against the cause...

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeeeze, just reading a few of the first posts on here you'd think that SVG icons were the end of the world. Nothing could be farther from the truth...

One of the big reasons I like OSX (and I do not own a Mac, FYI) are the scalable vector icons. We've had vector based fonts for quite some time and you'd be hard pressed to find anybody out there who would rally against the scourge of vector fonts. For crying out loud... I believe it's KDE that has font anti-aliasing. I am sure we all have seen WindowsXP's "clear type" font smoothing. Anti-aliased fonts work pretty damn well and look absolutely super!

Having the same capability with something as lowly as desktop icon is amazing! The next logical step is UI widgets and other elements of the desktop.

As more and more LCD and other high-quality displays become the norm (many laptops feature 1400x1050 or 1600x1200 displays these days), not only are scalable fonts and UI widgets neccessary, there is an inherent human aspect to having a computer interface with the same perceived clarity of the real world.

I think this is a fantastic implementation of vector graphics. I only hope that we can soon have entire UI's based around scalable graphics as well.

Re:odd

[Proc6]

Well dummy, its like this. The higher resolution the display you get, the finer detail images and video (some day) can get. Buuuut... the harder it is to see windows elements of fixed size. (icons) I run 1920x1200 on a flat panel, and when my father sits down in front of it, he has to squint to read the text and see the icons on the desktop. Ever seen 1600x1200 on a Dell Latitude notebook? Go find the IBM QUXGA 22" LCD panel that does something like 5000x3000 and tell me how big the icons on the desktop are. Its like clicking on dust.

SGI's Indigo Magic desktop has done scalable vector icons forever, and its beautiful. Not only can you set the standard icon size but they put a handy thumbwheel in the "explorer" window to let you zoom in and out of your files.

Don't knock it till you've tried it. :)

Finally, great news for users :)

[CheeseCow]

This is excellent news. After getting a new monitor that does 1600x1200, I found those tiny icons a bit hard to click at times. But now, I can run whatever resolution I want, and the icons will just look better & better.

Heck, now the word "resolution" will start to have meaning! Instead of getting more small icons on your screen when going from 800x600 --> 1600x1200, you could get more detailed ones. And if it renders faster than PNG images, then we can have both great looks & high speed. Way to go! :D

Re:I just don't care!

[realnowhereman]

And I want mine to be the same size regardless of my screen resolution. So I'll be happy and you can still use bitmaps.

Bloody hell - there is "the glass is half empty" and then there's "I hate glasses and really don't see what use they are to me or the rest of the planet".

Mindblowing

[CoderByBirth]

I really think that scaleable icons are gonna be THE killer application of tomorrows operating systems.

Seriously, why not go all the way and question the whole concept of icons?
They could be allowed more degrees of freedom in their representation of a complex data object. Consider a 3D spinning folder icon, which somehow gives you an idea of how much data/what type of data is contained in the folder.
Now THAT would be neat.

And GNOME significantly predates that

[0x0d0a]

GNOME's been doing SVG icons for a long time -- this is an evolutionary improvement. This is another area in which it took quite a while for KDE to catch up, not GNOME.

I wonder if KDE is using libsrvg to render the icons, as opposed to some Qt stuff. If so, both environments will immediately benefit.

Re:A better way to clone the OSX look and feel?

[GauteL]

You seem to be under the impression that the OSX-icons are SVG. This is not true. They are just resource forks containing several different sized icons so that they seem to scale "magically".

They might be drawn with Vector based drawing, but they ARE converted before used as icons. KDE does the same thing. The excellent Crystal Icons are SVG-based, but they are converted to PNG for KDE, hence the incorrect assumption that KDE supports SVG. KDE is supposed to get SVG-support in KDE 3.2.

Re:I just don't care!

[Atzanteol]

Bloody hell - there is "the glass is half empty" and then there's "I hate glasses and really don't see what use they are to me or the rest of the planet".

I couldn't have put it better myself. Have you noticed the massive influx of people with a "New technology? Bah!" attitude? Every time someone develops something new there's one idiot with a "My aunt Tilly doesn't use it, so I don't see how it could be of use for anybody." attitude.

I am not your aunt Tilly people!