A History of Icons

John H. Doe writes "The GUIdebook has a great page illustrating the history of icons. Of course, they have the Lisa/Mac/OS X paths, but there's the Windows progressions, along with entries for NeXT, OS/2, BeOS, and yes, Linux. Would you call it progress?"

Comments

Rolling your own

[ackthpt]

I haven't been big on designing my own Windows icons because, before I gave up looking, all icon editors cost $$. Inexplicably the one format Paint doesn't support is *.ico

I used to have some beauties on my Amiga, and they could be any size I liked, up to the whole screen if that was your wish. IIRC they were easy to draw with something that came with the operating system.

I'd like to take some of my raytracings and make them icons. Any ideas where to start?

Darn my dyslexia. At first glance I thought it said "A History of Loons" and thought it was something biographical about slashdot.

Re:Rolling your own

[wiredlogic]

Inexplicably the one format Paint doesn't support is *.ico

That's because the Windows .ico format is a complex meta-format with the capacity for multiple icon sizes and color depths. Paint Is just a rudimentary application like notepad and has never been the target of much improvement by MS.

The best Windows tool for editing icons is Microangelo. There is a shareware trial version available.

Re:Rolling your own

[razjml]

Ahh, the good old days of throwing a MacOS 7 icon together with ResEdit. Too bad there's no quick and dirty all-in-one utility like that in MacOS X. That was the pinnacle of mac hacking.

Re:Rolling your own

[stratjakt]

There are plenty of free icon editors out there.

Thing is, there are bajillions of free icons out there too, so we've never wasted time drawing our own.

Nobody cares much about them anyways, they only care if the button the icon is sitting on works when they click it.

Re:Rolling your own

[Random Chaos]

Well, I have found a few freeware ICO editing programs, but really you don't need them unless you want a multi-size icon (one that looks good in both a toolbar and in a folder).

It turns out that Windows can read BMPs as ICOs. Just make a BMP of the right size (16x16, 32x32, or 64x64) and rename the extension from .bmp to .ico.

----

As for my most used icons: Giving all my hard disks a icon with the drive letter on it. Makes using a tool bar (I have a "goto" toolbar that links to every drive and a few important folders) easy to locate which drive is which (I only have 6 partitions/hard drives on my windows box).

Re:Rolling your own

[rsmeds]

I use a lovely Deluxe Paint clone called ProMotion (http://www.cosmigo.com/promotion//) for all my bitmapping needs. USD 29.95 for the lite version, which is probably good enough. Definitely worth the money if you do a lot of traditional pixel-gfx.

AFAIK, it only supports up to 256 colors, though, so for converting raytraced images to icons, it might not be the perfect tool.

Re:Rolling your own

[raider_red]

You can just use a .tif file and use interface builder to add it to your program.

Re:Rolling your own

[Instantlemming]

Yeah, screen-sized icons in a whopping 4 colours! (which also were the WRONG colours if you deviated from the standard Workbench theme)
Then we had about 3 different icon-enhancement sets, and the ugly MUI won...

But I want a decent icon editor and a pointer editor too!
I miss the pointer editor from OS/2Warp...

Re:Rolling your own

[nazh]

I design the icons in .png then convert them to .ico with png2ico works both on *nix and windows. You can also add several different image sizes in the icon file you make with this program.

Re:Rolling your own

[Anonymous Coward]

Use the gimp... its free and supports this format. I made my own Shuffle icon for my pc so it would look more like it does in OSX.

Re:Rolling your own

[tgrigsby]

Graphics Workshop Professional will convert just about anything to an ICO. It's not 100% though -- sometimes you end up with an icon that's off-center for some odd reason. But I love this application -- I've been using it for years now and it's just too handy not to have. It's not terribly expensive, either.

Website: http://www.mindworkshop.com/
Price: $44.95

I also have the GIF Construction Set, which is great and all, but I'm just as likely to use some of my other graphics tools to create GIFs, or just use Flash. Xara3D is good for animated text.

rambling...

Re:Rolling your own

[iBod]

Try...

http://www.microangelo.us/

Re:Rolling your own

[Renegrade]

I haven't been big on designing my own Windows icons because, before I gave up looking, all icon editors cost $$. Inexplicably the one format Paint doesn't support is *.ico

I believe the official Microsoft way to make icons is via the Visual Studio developer kit. Worst $500 icon editor ever.

I used to have some beauties on my Amiga, and they could be any size I liked, up to the whole screen if that was your wish. IIRC they were easy to draw with something that came with the operating system.

It was a <sarcasm>really counter-intuitive</sarcasm> name, "IconEdit". It was in the Tools folder on your system drive (or disk if/when you used floppies)

(Sys:Tools/IconEdit)

Re:Rolling your own

[n1ywb]

My God, ResEdit was the shiznizzle! Resources! Words fail to describe just how GOOD that idea was. I still don't understand how Apple could have had so much potential and yet they still sucked out, at least until OS-X.

Re:Rolling your own

[Leo McGarry]

Or, if you choose to get fancy, you can assemble a variety of sizes and bit depths with Icon Composer, which is included with the bundled developers' tools.

Re:Rolling your own

[Dogtanian]

I used to have some beauties on my Amiga, and they could be any size I liked, up to the whole screen if that was your wish.

Was this a *good* thing? IIRC, Amiga programs came with lots of oddly-shaped icons that frequently *were* a large portion of the screen-size.

I'm sure it's nice for the designer's ego, but massive icons aren't that great from a usability point-of-view.

Re:Rolling your own

[yintercept]

all icon editors cost $$.

Well, when you consider all of the things that icons do, they certain are worth the money you spend on the icon editor.

Have you ever clicked on an icon? You click on an icon and, bammo, there's a big spread sheet or email program on your screen or something. Icon editors must be complex and expensive to accomplish that. Seeing all of the amazing things icons do, it is the one software expense that the guys in purchasing will have no problem approving.

On an unrelated note, being a manager of a large software development team, I had been wondering why you techies like Dilbert so much. I have a big informative staff meeting. Afterwards, the techies gather around to pick the Dilbert that matches the meeting. I don't get it.

Re:Rolling your own

[alfboggis]

This page is a useful guide if you ever need to create icons for Windows XP. It gives information on style, perspective and colours needed to make icons consistent with that OS. They recommend an app called GifMovieGear to create the actual icon files.

Re:Rolling your own

[grahamlee]

/Developer/Applications/Utilities/Icon Composer.app

I think that says it all.

Re:Rolling your own

[pinchhazard]

What you want is Irfanview. Supports a shitload of formats, plugins, etc. It's lightweight. It saves .ico format. Irfanview is the shiz.

Re:Rolling your own

[Pope Raymond Lama]

www.gimp.org

Re:Rolling your own

[Cutterman]

Neil Rubenking's IconEdit32 first appeared in PCMag in March 2000. "With IconEdit32 you can create icons that can include all valid combinations of size and color depths - up to nine images. It features various drawing tools, such as a pencil, dropper, paint, line, rectangle and ellipse. You can also easily add text to your icon. The main window shows both an enlarged version of the icon, and a preview area that displays the icon against a background color of your choice. The icon can be shifted in any direction, rotated, mirrored and flipped." Free. Dozens of places to find it on the Web.

Re:Rolling your own

[Hes Nikke]

i'm quite fond of Iconagrpher as an icon creation/editing tool. It works well in a pinch, however, i usualy design my icons in photoshop at 256x256 (or higher) then scale them down, and drop them into iconographer. :)

Re:Rolling your own

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of Amiga, it is a pretty damn important system to be omitted in such a comparison. I don't know what that comparison professes to be (only seen the one mirrordot page), but AmigaOS had a very much working GUI...in 1985. Colour too, of course. I bet the other icons were to embarrased and kicked it out. ; )

So sad that most of the few people who know about it think it was all about gaming. On the other hand, it's a nice chart, so I shouldn't just complain I guess.

Re:Rolling your own

[the darn]

Ahh, yes! You should have seen mom's face when she noticed that I had replaced her trash can icon with a carefully crafted toilet. When you put files in it, instead of swelling like the can did, I added tasteful wavy green 'stink lines'. Those were the days...

Re:Rolling your own

[Saeger]

Definitely one of the easier ways to make quick favicon's for websites.

I usually just take some representative artwork or branding and crop & resize it down to 16x16 before converting. A pixel artist I ain't.

Re:Rolling your own

[hattig]

Yes, it was a good idea.

Unimportant, but maybe required at some point, files/folders could have small icons.

Important files (e.g., the application itself) would havea big icon. They'd also have a location in the window that was easy to get to, e.g., the centre.

Files you never need to see had no icon, and you'd have to select the option to view all files to see them.

A good use of Fitt's Law.

Re:Rolling your own

[MightyMartian]

OS/2 came with an icon editor. Wasn't a great tool, but it did the job. I could never figure out why Windows never shipped one.

Re:Rolling your own

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a nice modified firefox icon.

It shows the firefox shagging an IE icon instead of the world. :)

Re:Rolling your own

[Freshie]

You can make an icon in paint. an icon is a bmp with the extension changed. The first pixel in the upper left denotes the transparency. Granted it won't give you sizability, but if all you icons are 48x48, just make it 48x48, and save it with a .ico extension. :)

Re:Rolling your own

[GerbilSoft]

Who needs multiple icon sizes or color depths when you've got SVG icons?

Re:Rolling your own

[c0ldfusi0n]

Personally, i use PhotoShop for everything, so i figured i might as well use it for icons. There's a plugin from Telegraphics that allows you to save your image as ICO. Alright, it's not really an icon editor as you can only save one icon per ICO file, but you get to use a powerful tool..

Re:Rolling your own

[T3kno]

I like these icons better, the nicest FF and TBird icons I've seen. Kudos to whomever did them!

Re:Rolling your own

[Dogtanian]

That's good in theory, but in practice, it requires people to stick to the guidelines you gave. I have memories of opening disks full of programs with massive icons that didn't help much.

And, to be fair to windows, it lets you hide system files (though I don't).

Re:Rolling your own

[Anonymous Coward]

Who needs multiple icon sizes or color depths when you've got SVG icons?

Everyone. Vector graphics solve the problem of scaling artefacts; they do not, by themselves, adjust the level of detail as you zoom.

Scale an SVG icon right down. Observe how any fine detail becomes a mess of pixels/a blurry mass, depending on whether your SVG implementation antialiases or not.

Scale an SVG icon right up. Observe how it looks like crap, albeit crap drawn with lines rather than crap drawn with a grid of squares.

There is never a magic bullet, and SVG icons, while neat, are never going to look significantly better than bitmap icons a la OS X. (Count the number of OS X users who swear blind they already have vector-based icons, if you don't believe me.)

Re:Rolling your own

[Anonymous Coward]

Inexplicably the one format Paint doesn't support is *.ico

That, my friend, is what Photoshop was created for.

Re:Rolling your own

[after fallout]

try snico at http://www.snidesoft.com it is freeware

Re:Rolling your own

[Picticon]

I'm the author of Iconian, Picticon, and several other Amiga icon utilities. Ahh I do miss those big, gaudy icons... I get teary eyed thinking about my Amigas.

When I moved over to Windows 95, my first project was going to be an icon editor. Then I realized that icons in Windows suck. Such tiny little things. Sigh.

But seriously, the best icon editor I've found on Windows is the one built into Visual C++ 6. It's straight forward and no-frills. Very easy to use. And it's included for free as part of my line of work.

I tried some of the shareware crap out there. $20 to 50$ for some of the buggiest, confusing P.O.S. programs out there. Micheangelo in particular was VERY confusing to me. But everyone recommends it.

Re:Rolling your own

[hattig]

Each icon format has its own advantages and disadvantages in the end.

Windows does have the ability to have different sized icons, which does mean that you can have a small icon in list mode, and a large icon in a different view. However I'm sure you've done the "hunt for the installer icon" when installing an application with tonnes of files in the same directory.

Amiga had any-size icons and clicked alternate images. It didn't have any control over the creator however. Still it was a good solution for the time, given that the usual way of launching an application back then was by running the application directly, not via a menu system or taskbar, etc. Many applications came with a decent setup, a reasonable sized main application image, etc. Games came with vast icons though.

These days it isn't such an issue though.

Re:Rolling your own

[Ark42]

Thats not true. ICO files have 2 channels per image (an XOR mask and an AND mask) plus other data different from BMP, such as the number of sizes and colors in the .ICO file.

Re:Rolling your own

[rizzo420]

the only issue i have is that the firefox icons are not a fox, but a red bird, more like firebird. the thunderbird ones are nice though.

Re:Rolling your own

[chriscrowley]

I found a free Photoshop plug-in that lets you open and save ICO files and you can even download the GPL source. It doesn't work as well as most of the Shareware icon editors which I gave up using after I found this tool, but it does a good enough job. I'll probably send the author $5 eventually.

http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/

On a side note, anyone remember the icons on SGI's Irix? I loved how they were vector based and would scale to any size. I'm surprised that many of the newer OSes don't use this idea, but I guess designing those icons are much more time consuming than filling in blocks on a 16x16 or 32x32 sized matrix.

Re:Rolling your own

[value_added]

Consistent with XP? That would mean an odd mixture of sometimes 16, sometimes 32 colours, sometimes more, and sizes in ranging (depending on the icon) from 16x16 to 48x48, each size being made available in either 16 or 32 colours or more, or all three, but not always, and depending on which .dll that particular icon is being served from, as opposed to other .dlls which contain an identical (but not always) icon.

There was a Slashdot article posted some time ago where Steve Jobs was quoted as saying (way back when, and I paraphrase) that Bill Gates never understood the concept of design.

Despite the overhaul made for the XP interface, much of the same crap found on NT, 2K, etc. can be found on XP, and the inconsistencies aren't limited to icon choices.

As for the icon editor recommendation, unless it's capable of replacing the icons buried in innumerable .dlls, I don't believe it could compare favourably against any number of alternatives (Microangelo, etc.) which, thankfully, make Windows at least bearable.

But that's just an opinion. I have otheres, of course.

Re:Rolling your own

[Ark42]

http://ark42.com/freeimage/alphahlp.exe is a nice little free command line utility that can:

• Convert to/from png/tga/tif/bmp/ico
• split/join alpha channels to/from separate files
• split/join multi-page images into single images per page (tif/ico specific)
• split/join image tiles (where you, for example, have 8 16x16 toolbar icons stored as a 128x16 image)

Re:Rolling your own

[Ark42]

"nine valid images" ?

I know monochrome is pretty old, but I assume this means 16 color, 256 color, or 24bit. There is also a 32bit format used in Windows XP and higher, which supports an alpha channel as a replacement for the AND-mask. I guess it only supports 16x16, 32x32, and 48x48 sizes? Those are pretty common, but icons are valid at any combination of sizes 1 to 255.
Thats at least 325,125 valid image combinations so far.

Re:Rolling your own

[Anonymous Coward]

Steve Jobs was quoted as saying (way back when, and I paraphrase) that Bill Gates never understood the concept of one true way.

Re:Rolling your own

[raider_red]

Thanks. I'll check that out next time I get some time to work with XCode. I'm just learning how to program for the Mac, so I'm happy to pick up hints wherever I can find them.

Re:Rolling your own

[DrWhizBang]

From the page you linked:

* - Altorught this version is known as "SVG", the icons are still in PNG format, the SVG files will be relased once the support for the format improves in KDE.

Not SVG. And Jimmac doesn't agree with you anyways.

Re:Rolling your own

[chromaphobic]

Jobs is not one to talk. OS X (and Apple apps) are a mish-mash of visual styles that seem to have been picked using a dart/dartboard selection method.

The finder is brushed metal, unless you hide the sidebar and toolbar, then it's Aqua. Safari, iTunes, Quicktime & iCal are all brushed metal, but then there's Mail, System Prefs, Preview that are Aqua.

Then, you start getting into Apple's other apps, like Garageband, Final Cut, Logic, et al and there's all kinds of visual styles that are neither Brushed Metal or Aqua. Ahhh!

I used to let it bother me, especially before I had a dual G5 and Brushed Metal apps (in particular) were horribly sluggish on my G4. Now, I just shrug it off. Apple wrote their Human Interface Guidlines, so I guess they can ignore or re-write them as they see fit, whatever GUI style (and Jobs whim) they need to accomodate. :-)

Re:Rolling your own

[Leo McGarry]

It's an incredibly simply program. You just drag and drop images of various bit depths and resolutions to the appropriate wells, then save out an ".icns" file, which you can put into your Xcode project in place of the TIFF you might otherwise use for your application icon.

Re:Rolling your own

[Chief Typist]

Icon Composer is fine for developers who "just want to get the job done". If you're a designer who's developing a suite of icons with a consistent theme/style, you're going to be using Freehand/Illustrator and Photoshop (easier to review & edit.) To output from Photoshop, they use IconBuilder

When you're dealing with applications that have hundreds of icons (think about MS Office) tools like Icon Composer just don't cut it.

-ch

Re:Rolling your own

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but getting the colors right is damn hard with that thing. I could never get it to work right.

Try making 16 color icons, or converting a RGB to lower colors. Pffft, most of the time the resulting icon won't even work in Windows applications.

Re:Rolling your own

[GerbilSoft]

That page hasn't been updated in a while. The Crystal SVG icon theme that comes with KDE includes the SVG versions as well as PNG.

Re:Rolling your own

[hairyfeet]

Google freeware world team.They have thousands of free and open source apps and a great google style interface.just type in "make icons" and you'll find many great free icon tools.If you need a free program to do any job,you should try them first.great site.I have custom icons on the popsel app that i got from there to replace my overloaded quicklaunch.Now i just click the a/v icon for anything audio/video,G for games,And util for tools.With the big bright custom icons even my little nephews can find any program easy!

Re:Rolling your own

[JabberWokky]

Hunh. Just renaming a .gif or .png to .ico works for Konqueror and Firefox. I thought it did for IE as well. Not sure about Safari or Opera, though.

--
Evan

Re:Rolling your own

[Anonymous Coward]

please mod the above guy into oblivion. i wish he posted with a real account...

Re:Rolling your own

[Anonymous Coward]

Also count the number of OSX users who don't have a clue. Surprisingly both that number and the number who swear they have vector icons are almost the same as the number of OSX users. There really needs to be a -5 "Mac users are morons" mod on /..

Re:Rolling your own

[MrBallistic]

on the pro side, iconfactory has a great program called iconbuilder. it's easy to use, integrates with photoshop, and builds icons for both xp and os x. great tool, that.

Re:Rolling your own

[Anonymous Coward]

chad randall? hey!

microangelo (written by a group of whacko neopagans) is pretty crappy, i agree. never understood why folks like it so much...

Re:Rolling your own

[zonker]

someone above mentioned using vector graphics as icons (.svg). someone else mentioned an article from a dude that goes into explaining why it may not be such a good idea after all. mostly because the scaling is processor intensive and depending on how it is scaled it can produce incomprehensible tiny graphics or very large messy strokes that look awful.

doesn't seem like an issue that is insurmountable though. i guess i would think you could create a .svgi (svg icon) file that had prescaled high and low bitmapped sizes and use the vector stuff for everything in between. if you build the scaling engine to use directx or opengl it would seem the processor usage wouldn't be so bad...

Re:Rolling your own

[jc42]

I think that says it all.

Maybe, but where is it all documented? I looked all around in its menus and meagre Help stuff, and couldn't find a thing that let me do any image editing at all. I could load images from iPhoto, but I couldn't find even a way to do a bit of cropping. All it seems to allow is loading images from other apps or files, and has no actual "composing" ability at all.

From the name "Icon Composer", I was expecting something that would let me edit individual pixels and perform at least a few of the more common transformations. Nope; none to be found anywhere.

So what am I missing? Where's the "compose" stuff hidden?

Re:Rolling your own

[porksoda]

...Inexplicably the one format Paint doesn't support is *.ico

1) Open up paint.

2) Create 16x16 image.

3) Save as windows bitmap.

4) Open up IE or FireFox or whatever, and view the bitmap from there.

5) Right click the bitmap, choose Save As..., select the .bmp format, but give it an .ico extension.

Problem solved.

Re:Rolling your own

[tomhudson]

the only issue i have is that the firefox icons are not a fox

Neither does Excel excel.
Photoshop isn't a place to get your pix developed.
Paint Shop won't sell you a gallon of white latex
Word would like to have a word with you.
Neither is PowerPoint powerful in the hands of most users, or good at making points
The GIMP, at leas[tt], *IS* "gimpy", The UI drives me nuts!!!!!!!

Life is full of disappointments. Icons are the LEAST of my problems.

Re:Rolling your own

[Tape_Werm]

It's similar to situation of FTP clients, they're all shite, but some don't smell as bad as the others. Microangelo is quite buggy, and definitely not worth the price they charge. However, it's better than most of the other editors I've tried. So I guess that's why it gets the reputation it has.

Re:Rolling your own

[mughi]

vector graphics solve the problem of scaling artefacts; they do not, by themselves, adjust the level of detail as you zoom.

Actually, they're starting to. Just look at section 12.3 of the SVG 1.2 spec: "Alternate content based on display resolutions". Not only is it in the spec, but it's shown up on the roadmaps of things such as librsvg. Just two or three levels can replace a slew of bitmap icons.

Re:Rolling your own

[Anonymous Coward]

I note that unlike windows, replacing a creator's naff icon was a simple matter if you didn't like it on AmigaOS.

In windows, the icons are often embedded _into_ the executable. Blargh!

The AmigaOS stored icons in the .info file associated with the application executable. Replace the info file, replace the icon.

Linux on the other hand, goes too far, typically: icons are in central locations and often only loosely and even manually (either by the distro maker or the end user) associated with the application.

AmigaOS had a happy medium: Creator of application chose the default, user could faff with it if he could be bothered. If application author didn't make a default, OS inserted crappy default icon for him and everyone laughed, so there was always motivation for good icons.

Re:Rolling your own

[springbox]

Resource Hacker is a nice tool for editing the resource files in windows binary files. It lets you replace dialogs, icons, etc. Probably works with DLLs, but I haven't used it recently.

Re:Rolling your own

[Anonymous Coward]

all icon editors cost $$

That's completely untrue. You obviously didn't search very hard.

Check out LiquidIcon XP from X2 Studios. It costs nothing and can create and edit icons as well as cursors.

Re:Rolling your own

[grahamlee]

I looked all around in its menus and meagre Help stuff, and couldn't find a thing that let me do any image editing at all.

Welcome to the UNIX philosophy - little tools that do one task well. You can use an image editor for editing image files - you use an icon composer for composing icons files (in this case, .icns). You combine the two and you can create an icons file from your arbitrarily edited image.

I could load images from iPhoto, but I couldn't find even a way to do a bit of cropping.

Yegad. Last time I checked, iPhoto was capable of said function.

Re:Rolling your own

[spectecjr]

AmigaOS had a happy medium: Creator of application chose the default, user could faff with it if he could be bothered. If application author didn't make a default, OS inserted crappy default icon for him and everyone laughed, so there was always motivation for good icons.

The user can still faff with it if they want in Windows too. Right click on the shortcut, and choose another icon if you want to from the Properties menu.

Some icons (IE, Outlook) don't do this, but they're not normal icons either...

Re:Rolling your own

[Dogtanian]

The AmigaOS stored icons in the .info file associated with the application executable. Replace the info file, replace the icon.

Downside; lots of .info files lying about the place. I didn't like that, personally.

Re:Rolling your own

[Anonymous Coward]

Works for me. You have to use the right color palette. Ofcourse, finding the right color palette can be tricky.

Re:Rolling your own

[Karl Tacheron]

You could just make the PNGs using Photoshop or a similar program and convert them in one of the many free programs that exist out there. To name a few, you could use IconSushi or the AveIconifier.

Re:Rolling your own

[eggsome]

That's because the Windows .ico format is a complex meta-format with the capacity for multiple icon sizes and color depths. Paint Is just a rudimentary application like notepad and has never been the target of much improvement by MS.

While it would be going too far to call this statement "wrong" you are basicly asserting that you cannot create a windows icon without all of that meta-data, orignaly windows icons had no such meta-data (Win 3.1 days) icons were just 32x32 monocrome or 16 color (4bit) BMP files renamed to .ICO.
Indeed, if you create such a file in MS Paint and rename it, it will be recognised as a valid icon. It will even automagicly create a 16x16 version for use in the Start menu ect. This is true for all windows right up to and including WinXP.

The original .ICO format was Very Very simple.

Re:Rolling your own

[netsharc]

Wow, that sure brings back memories, I used to have this program back in Windows 3.1 days (or was it even DOS?), with the cool big-eyed frog!

Nowadays I use IrfanView though, which can also save as ICO.. to create the image itself I use Paint Shop Pro..

Re:Rolling your own

[n1ywb]

Typical apple zealot reaction. Here I am singing the praises of ResEdit AND OS-X and yet I still get modded as flamebait because I mention that Apple had a few shitty years. Face the facts, people.

Re:Rolling your own

[ken-reno]

Do you know how much icons cost to buy $$$$? There are lots of variables but US companies charge $400 to $500 per icon. We send ours to a guy in Russia who does them for ~$150 each. He does great work though he is not that punctual.
If this sound like a lot of money consider that each icon is an Adobe Illustrator file that looks like a 3-d rendering of the image. The icons are then converted to various bit map formats and color depths. As they get small, they require hand retouching. One also typically also need normal, selected and disabled version

Re:Rolling your own

[Anonymous Coward]

So were you born stupid? Or did someone repeatedly drop you on your head every hour for the formative years in your life?

Deja Vu

[suso]

Or if you don't like this slashdot article, you can read the same one that was posted on slashdot exactly one year ago (well, almost exactly)

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Re:Deja Vu

[NetNifty]

That was a history of GUIs, this focuses on icons.

Re:Deja Vu

[ackthpt]

Or if you don't like this slashdot article, you can read the same one that was posted on slashdot exactly one year ago (well, almost exactly) Sorry, I couldn't resist.

A year ago?!??! That's ancient history!

We here at slashdot require only the most up to date information.

Geez.. trying to pass off old news as current... wotta lotta nerve..

An it's all slashdotted, too.

Re:Deja Vu

[yorugua]

Seems sometimes history repeats itself... and in this particular case, the site is /.'ed once again... We haven't learned how to put links to "weaker" sites using nyud.net:8090 just yet. Give it another year..

Re:Deja Vu

[Ki Master George]

There is a difference:

The old one announces the existance of GUIdebook (which is described as a history of all things GUI, not all things icons). The new one announces a page on GUIdebook about the history of icons.

Re:Deja Vu

[biglig2]

I don't know which is sadder, when a slashdot editor posts two dupes a story apart, or when a slashdot reader spots two dupes a year apart...

As typical

[imsabbel]

no slashdot story summery with an idiodic comment.
YES, IT WAS PROGRESS.
And yes, its nice to have icons, even if you, mr submitter, probably still think that anything thats not a cli is bad.

Amiga Icons

[Moby Cock]

I know on my Amiga 500 I used to draw icons in Icon Editor, and it was pretty cool. I too had some real beauties. I miss Workbench, it was pretty sweet.

Re:Amiga Icons

[YorgleLlama]

you can always use AmiWM, using my 1.x patch... http://www.cis.rit.edu/~jerry/Software/amiwm/ :)

Re:Amiga Icons

[British]

Didn't the Amiga OS allow icons of any size to exist? That tended to get obnoxious.

Re:Amiga Icons

[SharpFang]

Some interesting features of Amiga icons:
- Arbitrary size
- Could change image when clicked
- Possible arbitrary placement

This was making for some interesting applications. Like, the game Heimdall had screen high and half-screen wide icon of the character with a warhammer, when clicked the character was slamming the hammer down. I would add a tiny, 5x5px icon placing it over corner of Filemaster 2.2 icon just to launch Filemaster 2.0 in case it was needed (just like small "arrow down" in corner of "back" of Firefox)
There were tools converting pictures to icons. You could tile icons being parts of bigger image over some area, making a "clickable image". Clicking on directory ("drawer") icon was "opening the drawer", there were also many other cool "mini-anims" like hydraulic press "compressing" the package for a compressor program, a floppy multiplying itself for file copy etc.
Windows was a BIG step backwards from Amiga icon functionality. That step was never undone. Now all leading OSes have single-image, fixed-size icons.

Re:Amiga Icons

[Dogtanian]

Some interesting features of Amiga icons: - Arbitrary size. Windows was a BIG step backwards from Amiga icon functionality. That step was never undone. Now all leading OSes have single-image, fixed-size icons.

Yeah, the multiple images were nice. HOWEVER... we have enough problems under Windows with stupid non-standard GUI flashy crap, without allowing those same aesthetically-challenged cretins to design icons that take up three-quarters of the screen.

I'm sure those assholes would make hideous fully-animated icons that ran whenever they were visible and consumed 75% of your processor time... if it were possible, that is.

Re:Amiga Icons

[CableModemSniper]

Now all leading OSes have single-image, fixed-size icons.

Well as far as fixed sized goes, yo've obviousy never used Gnome or KDE with SVG icons. And icons in the Dock of OS X can be animated, likewise the systray in windows.

Re:Amiga Icons

[tverbeek]

Now all leading OSes have single-image, fixed-size icons.

If by "now" you mean "1995", you're absolutely right. But in 2005, the leading OSes (i.e. Windows, Mac OS, Linux) all support multiple-resolution icons. OS X will even scale them in real time for you.

Re:Amiga Icons

[moonbender]

You've got 5 or so fixed sizes (in Windows anyway), that's still a step back from an arbitrary size, not to mention having them animated. I mean, personally I don't think it's much of a step backwards, but feature-wise I guess it is.

Re:Amiga Icons

[Anonymous Coward]

likewise the systray in windows.

Uh, if you mean "they can be changed by your proggie", then yeah. They are not really animations though, it's just your program changing the icon.

Re:Amiga Icons

[Soruk]

RiscOS supported multiple sized icons up to 256 colours - in 1988.

Re:Amiga Icons

[Bambi Dee]

Amiga icons were fixed-size in that there was no way to scale them. A drawer window could easily turn into a cluttered mess because all those variably-sized icons refused to line up properly, "clean up" or no "clean up". It was alright for games and goofy GUI fun, but on systems with as many files as anything recent tends to have I really prefer having icons that are all the same size, with that size being something specified by me. (Then again, for anything like that you'd probably want a list view, for which the Amiga had no icons anyway.) I loved the Amiga, but I never thought Workbench was all that great.

Re:Amiga Icons

[KarmaMB84]

As opposed to the systray or some other part of the OS flipping through the frames itself?

Re:Amiga Icons

[Kent Recal]

Fine with me. That way I know which of the crapware I just downloaded can be deleted right away without even clicking on it and which makes a sane first impression.

Re:Amiga Icons

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that amiga icons were stored in a separate file to the main executable. If you didn't like the creator's icon, it wasn't a risky binary edit to a .exe file to change it, you just overwrote the data in the .info file.

Re:Amiga Icons

[amaupin]

One of the most useful things about Amiga icons was that they could contain the command line arguments for the program they called.

Re:Amiga Icons

[master_p]

Windows was a BIG step backwards from Amiga

Brother, you couldn't have said it better:

• Workbench apps could run at their own private screen or in the main Workbench screen, whereas in Windows all apps run in the same screen.
• Each Workbench app could have its own resolution. Clicking the arrows in the menu bar would switch to the next app, changing the resolution automatically. You could edit your game's sprites in 320x240 while editing the game's code in 720x584 overscan.
• Workbench screens could be dragged down from the menu bar and reveal the screen underneath, with all resolutions visible in the same screen!. Drag-n-drop from one screen to the other was fully supported.
• The Amiga O/S was fully pre-emptive multitasking, without memory protection and virtual memory.
• Each Amiga app lived completely in its own directory. There were no installers, just decompress the app in a directory and click its icon. You could copy an app anywhere you liked, and it worked.
• The settings of each app were saved in an .info file, which was the app's registry. The application 'infoeditor' was used to edit the .info file. When you copied an executable from a Workbench window to another, the icon of the executable and the info file was copied along. No need to mess with a registry.
• Amiga drivers were installed with ...drag-n-drop. No need to reboot.
• Zorro slots were automatically configured. Plug-n-play without problems right from the start.
• When the Amiga read from the floppy, cd rom or hard disk, the applications did not grind to a halt. Even in my PC today (a mighty Athlon XP 2400+), when the CD/floppy stalls, the Windows Explorer goes bonkers.
• Amiga icons were animated. 'Nough said.
• The mouse cursor of the Amiga was a hardware sprite. It was so smoothly moving across the desktop in 50 fps. Even in the mightiest PC today, the mouse cursor is quite jerky.
• There was no silly limitation of 640 KB, and programming in C was as it was supposed to be: there was no silly large and small memory models.
• For those into programming, the Amiga's chipset was the easiest one programmable. If you wanted to change the resolution, you simply wrote the size of the screen in pixels at some memory location and the video mode was changed. In the PC, before Windows and DirectX, I had to struggle with mode-X, video timing registers that used characters as the display unit, weird memory addressing systems etc.
• The Amiga's command line was a joy! instead of using drive letters, the Amiga OS named its devices with user-defined names. When a device's name was changed, the links were not broken, because the O/S remembered the namings! Devices could also be accessed as 'device0:', 'device1:' etc.
• Amiga filenames could accept 32 characters, instead of 8 characters of DOS.
• Amiga had file types: a file type could be connected to an app, so when double-clicked, the registered app would open it, even from the command line.
• Amiga had AREXX, one of the finest scripting languages around. One could write whole apps in it...you could control everything with it, and most apps where scriptable through it!
• The menu bar was used as an information bar when the mouse was away from it, saving useful space. Now all apps waste space in status lines.
• My Amiga booted from HD in 10 seconds in WB 3.0. There weren't many things to do though: just load the WB(!!!).
• My Amiga could boot in GUI mode from a floppy, with WB fully ususable from floppy, both from GUI and command line.
• A friend of mine had an Amiga with two expansion cards: one with an 68030 at 40 MHz, and another with a PowerPC processor at 120 MHz. All CPUs of the machine could be run in parallel! he used to run Lightwave3d on the PowerPC, while the 68030 was busy with code editing and the main 68000 was copying stuff.
• The above mentioned conf

Re:Amiga Icons

[bjb]

You can do that with Windows shortcuts today. Create a shortcut to a document, program or whatever. You can specify working directory and program/arguments/etc. After that, you can assign an icon to it.

Its been a while since I've fired up my Amiga, but if I remember correctly, you created a specific icon type, created the graphic, and then set up the command line, etc.. You couldn't change the icon after the fact.

Re:Amiga Icons

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, only where is it now?

Re:Amiga Icons

[wolverine1999]

Couldn't you have run an emulator?

Re:Amiga Icons

[vortexau]

> Yeah, only where is it now?

Pardon? Where is WHAT now?

(posted from an AmigaOne XE-G4)

Google Cache

[WhatsAProGingrass]

This doesn't help much, but here is the cache from google. http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:3hJWEm5NPAkJ: www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/guidebook/icons/components +&hl=en

Re:Google Cache

[matth]

Why not just use mirrordot.org ?

Re:Google Cache

[Phisbut]

Why not just use mirrordot.org ?

Because the background made me go blind...

Re:Google Cache

[mattOzan]

Why not just use mirrordot.org ?

Because all the icons there are broken.

No, the icons are intact at Mirrordot.

Re:Google Cache

[randyest]

No, they really are broken. Mirrordot appears to be slashdotted, which is kinda funny since mirrordot claims to "solve the slashdot effect."

Re:Google Cache

[Anonymous Coward]

Now even the Google cache is slashdotted.

How the heck can I see these things?

History of Icons?

[Deliveranc3]

Worship the icon you techno pagans!

Re:History of Icons?

[y00nix]

Worship MIRRORDOT instead!
Click for the complete article with icons

Re:History of Icons?

[SpryGuy]

...except hat mirrordot is slashdotted, and all the links to the icon pics are broken. So that doesn't help at all.

Hmmm....

[Psychotext]

Where's my flaming server icon?

I think it's about time that slashdot AUTOMATICALLY posted mirrors for the static pages they link to. Either that or stop posting links to crappy little servers that can't handle the traffic!

Re:Hmmm....

[Anonymous Coward]

What a novel and unique idea!

Re:Hmmm....

[Anonymous Coward]

Those answers are excuses.

There is no difference between slashdot providing a mirror of a page, and a http proxy. Slashdot would just have to be a huge http proxy, where only pages that the http headers say can be cached are cached. All sites that don't want to be cached already have no-cache headers for other proxies. My ISP even sets up the default configuration of its hundreds of thousands of clients to automatically use a http proxy. To say slashdot would be somehow a "special" proxy is ridiculous.

I suspect the real reason slashdot doesn't cache pages is because it costs money. The slashdot pages itself are a ton of bandwidth. Add all the linked stories that can be cached to that, and you get a doubling or tripling of the bandwidth bill.

Re:Hmmm....

[matth]

Why not just use mirrordot.org ?

Re:Hmmm....

[Ki Master George]

The servers ought to be setting up HTTP Redirects if they get Slashdotted (and they're able to at least partially handle it).

Re:Hmmm....

[JoshRoss]

It appears that mirrordot does not mirror images. So, I wonder why they even mirrored that page?

Re:Hmmm....

[baadger]

Why doesn't the slashcode include something like this...

$post =~ si/http:\/\/([^\/]+)\/?/http:\/\/$1.nyud.net:8090/ g;

My perl isn't so good..but wouldn't that be ever so trivial?

Re:Hmmm....

[jea6]

Sure they do.

Slooooooow Server...

[Shadow Wrought]

Looks like an iconoclast got to it.

my favorite icon

[JeanBaptiste]

moof the dogcow!

Re:my favorite icon

[fussili]

The Dogcow's name is Clarus, it simply makes the sound "Moof" :) It's a common misconception.

Re:my favorite icon

[Jim Hall]

Kare's web site has a link to the Moof Icon store on cafepress. You can buy tshirts and such with the dogcow on them! :-)

No buttons, though ... I'd like to have a bunch of dogcow buttons for my next meeting (lots of Mac users there, it would be fun to hand them out.)

Mirror

[Broke Mirror]

http://www.aci.com.pl.nyud.net:8090/mwichary/guide book/icons/components

Re:Mirror

[Blaskowicz]

looks like that mirror is slashdotted too.

Re:Mirror

[TruthSeeker]

In case of Slashdotting, break mirror.

Oh, and we broke it ...

Icons are history

[Enigma_Man]

Slashdotted... Why do they even bother linking to a page full of images?

-Jesse

Re:Icons are history

[marcansoft]

not only that, but mirrordot didn't get in on time, and now 404's me on the link. Plus the page is totally dead, Connection Refused.

Re:Icons are history

[marcansoft]

working now... reeeeeeeeaaaaaallllllllsssssslllllllooooooowwwwww

Icons?

[chrispl]

Hm, all of the icons look like the same "broken image" icon to me...

Slashdotted to hell.

Re:Icons?

[ewieling]

Most icons look to me like some psychopath's attempt at drawing a toaster.

Full article text!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a chart of icons from various interfaces. Clicking on GUI names, section names or icons themselves will lead to the appropriate page: Options Show GUI families: Lisa Office System Mac OS NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP/Rhapsody Windows OS/2 GEOS/GeoWorks Apple II Amiga OS RISC OS BeOS Red Hat Linux QNX Solaris

progress?

[justforaday]

Hard to say whether it's progress, since I can't access TFA. However, I will say that the MS/Windows habit of trying to iconify every possible command is not progress. Some things simply cannot be conveyed via a 12x12 or 16x16 (or whatever the res is) pictogram.

Re:progress?

[Frankie70]

Hard to say whether it's progress, since I can't access TFA. However, I will say that the MS/Windows habit of trying to iconify every possible command is not progress. Some things simply cannot be conveyed via a 12x12 or 16x16 (or whatever the res is) pictogram.


Can you give an example?

Also can you suggest what should be done for the said example?

And also explain how 'iconyfing' the said command is bad?

Re:progress?

[Anonymous Coward]

I will say that the MS/Windows habit of trying to iconify every possible command is not progress.

And I will say that the Slashdot habit of blaming everything you don't like on Microsoft is also not progress.

Funny how in one article everyone's like "Apple is teh cool, they invented EVERYTHING and Microsoft just copied them", and then as soon as someone percieves something Apple popularised - like using icons for everything and deprecating the command line - as "bad", they blame Microsoft for it!

Apple are the ones to blame for dumbed-down icon-based interfaces. And KDE and Gnome have far more inscrutable icons than Windows does. So really, Microsoft are about as good as anyone gets in this one tiny regard... not that I expect anyone to give them credit for it.

Re:progress?

[Anonymous Coward]

If pictures are so powerful why did you type your message? Surely a picture would have been better.

Re:progress?

[Leo McGarry]

I'm guessing that he was referring to the tendency in programs like Microsoft Word to try to reduce every program function to an icon on a toolbar.

That is, indeed, a terrible idea. We have menu bars for a reason.

Re:progress?

[be-fan]

You miss the point. Apple's interfaces are not like Microsoft's interfaces. It's not the use of icons that's the problem, but the overuse of cryptic ones. MS Word is the most egregious offender. There are several toolbars full of tiny icons that don't really mean anything to you unless you've used the program before. Most Apple apps, however, have one or two toolbars of big, clear icons for the most important functionality. The rest is left to text labels in the menus.

Re:progress?

[tehshen]

Quick hyperbolic examples:

This screenshot is an example of Microsoft Word and its 16x16 buttons. Although most people can recognise the page icon for New, floppy disk icon (with the flap the wrong way round, too!) for Save, there are inexplicable little things like a set of tools, a clipboard with a tick on it, and a padlock. I could guess at what some of these mean, but without seeing the tooltip I couldn't be sure. It's a shame most applications have adopted this way of doing things.
Iconifying said commands is bad because it's hard to deduce said icon's meaning (little clipboard with a tick in it, for example).

For a better way, see the iWork applications (I can't find screenshots, though), which store most commands in menus, or GTK applications such as this one (I know gedit isn't as complex as Office, I'm just showing the toolkit). The save button has both a floppy disk icon and "Save" under it, if you weren't sure. Spellcheck has "Spellcheck" written under it. And you can change these things (globally) under Menus and Toolbars in Preferences.

Re:progress?

[kahei]

There are several toolbars full of tiny icons that don't really mean anything to you unless you've used the program before. Most Apple apps, however, have one or two toolbars of big, clear icons

So, it's a choice between:

A -- lots of functions, but you have to actually learn something before you can use them fluently

B -- a small number of functions, but with biiig pretty pictures

I'll pick A.

Re:progress?

[justforaday]

This is exactly what I was referring to. Rather than having an icon/button for every single command, it's a better idea to allow keyboard shortcut customization for the menu commands. That way, if someone is a power user, they can have a key-binding of their own choosing that performs the command, rather than having to move the mouse to click a button that they usually have to wait for the tooltip to appear on to make sure it's the right one.

Re:progress?

[cowscows]

I'll give a specific example that isn't really windows, but still bugs me. phpMyAdmin is an excellent piece of software that really makes my life easier. But a few versions ago they made a change that really bugs me. Before, if you were looking at a database, it could list all of the different tables in a chart, and it'd have links for all the different options (browse, insert, search, drop, empty, etc). Then one day I logged in and it was updated. All those quick little text links were replaced with tiny 16x16 icons. And they aren't even good icons. The icon for empty is a trashcan on top of some weird looking window. It's arguable whether or not a trashcan is a good symbol for empty, but regardless of that, the stupid window in the background makes it illegible. A finger pointing at a piece of paper stands for "structure"?

There are six commands in that table that they icon-ified. They saved maybe a few pixels of horizontal space, but I don't think they were hurting for room anyways. And it's a big step backwards in terms of usability and intuitiveness.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So isn't it overkill to use an image to replace one single word? How is that supposed to make things any easier?

It'd be like /. replacing the Submit and Preview button text with little images. What would be the point?

Re:progress?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except you deliberately ignored this part of your parent post:
The rest is left to text labels in the menus.
So no, you don't give up functionality, you just don't access it through meaningless pictures.

Re:progress?

[buckhead_buddy]

I agree with your assertion that:

I will say that the MS/Windows habit of trying to iconify every possible command is not progress.

I notice this especially in toolbars that attempt to cram the most common commands into tiny space. It may be "common" to use File:Open or File:Save, but these are probably the worst candidates for "useful" toolbar icons. You probably already have the shortcut ingrained in your hand motion already, and if you're using the mouse, the toolbar is hardly a twitch away from the menubar (where Open and Save's position are well known). On the Mac, I almost never see these two icons in default toolbar arrangements (there was a directive against doing this in Inside Macintosh long ago I think).

Even worse is when toolbars have only a fixed size. On today's smaller displays the physical resolution can go well above 96dpi. On those monitors I find small icons useless unless they are common ones (like "Find") or are sigils themselves (like "Play" or "Eject").

While Apple gets a lot of heat about making cosmetic eye candy, one thing they changed in OS X that goes unnoticed is that they upped the default icon size to 128x128 (and still let developers make smaller versions). Thus it makes it easy to make good looking, recognizable, icons that will scale up to almost 256x256 (with antialiasing) without starting to look choppy. While I don't expect toolbars to ever need 128x128, other places that use icons in the Mac OS (the app's "About" box, or the toolbar) really do benefit from these larger sizes.

I don't find Window's icons useless, but I think my habits of using them well are just because they frequently use the same (or similar) elements in their icon design. It WOULD probably throw me off somewhat for a developer to use a purple handle on their magnifying glass for their Find feature. Just because I have an expectation, and at the tighter dpi's my eyes don't want to work to decode whether purple has any significance in that icon. Windows has a good language for icons, but it doesn't scale up well to those tighter dpi's. I don't find Windows useless, but the differences from the Mac icons run deeper more than just cosmetics.

Re:progress?

[saltydogdesign]

Some things simply cannot be conveyed via a 12x12 or 16x16 (or whatever the res is) pictogram.

Tell that to the Chinese.

Re:progress?

[Bradee-oh!]

So, it's a choice between:

A -- lots of functions, but you have to actually learn something before you can use them fluently

B -- a small number of functions, but with biiig pretty pictures


I think you missed a key point of the grandparent post - That on may OSX applications the "small number of functions with biiig pretty pictures" are the icons visible on the default toolbars and the ADDITIONAL functionality is available through the menu system and keyboard shortcuts.

I think it would be very difficult to argue that OSX versions of the big applications actually have LESS functionality than the MSW versions - they don't. The whole point of this thread is that Microsoft would rather give you a smaaaaaal pretty picture for every single function you can perform which basically clutters up your screen and masks the simple, most common functions. The common OSX approach is to have those biiiig pretty pictures for the functions you'll use 80% of the time and provide organized, readable menus for the other functionality

As a power user I still have to learn applications. I would much rather hunt for the function I need in a menu system which follows an organizational pattern anyone who's used a computer before should be familiar with then search through the tooltips of scores of archaic pictures for what I need.

Re:progress?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see what the big deal is. Okay, so some of the icons aren't the greatest, but once you've used a program for awhile you get to know what they mean. Maybe you can't always tell what an icon does just by looking at it, but isn't that the whole purpose of tooltips? You don't like having so many icons? Each and every toolbar in any Microsoft Office program can be removed. Icons too small for you? A simple right click on a toolbar offers an option to customize it many ways, including the icon size. Want to create your own customized toolbar containing just the icons you use often? No problem. Want to use keyboard shortcuts? They're still there. No one's creating toolbar icons at the expense of keyboard commands. You can hide all toolbars and just navigate with the keyboard if that's what you like. This whole thread seems like just another excuse to bash Microsoft over nothing.

Re:progress?

[M$ Mole]

I notice this especially in toolbars that attempt to cram the most common commands into tiny space. It may be "common" to use File:Open or File:Save, but these are probably the worst candidates for "useful" toolbar icons. You probably already have the shortcut ingrained in your hand motion already, and if you're using the mouse, the toolbar is hardly a twitch away from the menubar

You'd think that, but trust me, I've seen users, when I've stood over them and told them to save their work, over and over again go to File, Save...going right over the icon in the toolbar and none of them EVER know shortcuts (I write software for police departments...and I'd say a good 60% of my users don't know that CTRL+C in Windows is "Copy", based on my personal experience).

MS's approach to "Lowest Common Demoninator" for users seems to be putting icons and menus and shortcuts everywhere, so the user can have 30 different ways to screw things up.

Re:progress?

[justforaday]

I'm not saying I have a problem with icon-based interfaces. I am saying that I have a problem with iconifying every single command. It makes sense to iconify commonly used commands. In one of my other responses, I point out how (IMHO) giving the "power users" the ability to assign keyboard shortcuts to any menu command is more usable than having an iconified button for every command. And yes, KDE/Gnome are worse off for it in many ways than Windows is.

Re:progress?

[ghqman]

Since Word etc allow you to hide or show the toolbars, and assign your own shortcuts to the commands what is the problem? That they allow toolbars for people who do like them?

Re:progress?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wooosshh..

Hear that? The point, fanboy, the point. You missed it.

He wasn't blaming Apple or anyone for dumbing down interfaces. He's refering to the current practice in the windows world - and KDE as well, there you go - of sticking icons all over the place, down to menus. Which is stupid because people can scan down lines of text much more easily than deciphering necessarily small icons.

FWIW, the Apple HIG specifically forbids icons in menus. Icons in toolbars have to be big -and- meaningful (unless you're writing Photoshop ;-), and toolbars optional (everything has to be accessible from the menus).

Re:progress?

[spitzak]

He is talking about "toolbars" as popularized by Microsoft software, not desktop icons. That idea is certainly Microsofts, whether it is good or bad. I do believe it is *way* overused, and am rather annoyed that they still have not figured out that there is no difference between the "menubar" and the "toolbar" and have failed to make them graphically match or merge them together. To be fair, Microsoft also came up with the popup tooltip that works (Apple's earlier version was too graphically intense and I believe had some other problems that made it hard to use as a quick reference), these tooltips make the "toolbar" as usable as a text bar and the screen realestate savings may be worth it. A vertical menubar with text would be far better, but you can probably blame Apple for convincing all the morons that a menu must be horizontal.

Both platforms are quite guilty of having inscrutable *appliation* icons, which I think you were talking about. This is mostly commercial software that insists on using their company logo rather than any representation of what it does. Microsoft has apparently given up, their nice looking modern icons use "W" to indicate Word, which is not really an icon, if you think about it!

Re:progress?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's what you do:
1) Open Microsoft Word
2) Right click on any toolbar. This will bring up a list of all available toolbars.
3) Uncheck all toolbars you don't want.

There you go. No more pretty pictures to threaten your geek-dom. No more clutter on your screen. Each and every keyboard shortcut is still functional. Each and every option is still accessible through the standard menu bar. Problem solved. Hell, if you want a toolbar with a few useful icons that doesn't match any of the predefined ones, you can easily create a custom one.

It's amazing how so many "power users" can have so much trouble with this. But hey, I guess it's more fun to bitch about Micro$oft than to take 30 seconds to realize that the exact functionality you want is already there.

Re:progress?

[tehshen]

once you've used a program for a while you get to know what they mean
True, but it's true for anything. I shouldn't have to learn what an icon does, I should be able to tell from looking at it.
For another example of how to do it better, see any desktop. There are clear icons with text under them, so you can see what it does.

A simple right click on a toolbar offers an option to customize it many ways, including the icon size.
In all the versions of Office I can use (2000 to XP) increasing the icon size just renders the pixels four times as big, not actually making them any clearer. (Microsoft Works does this better, oddly).

Each and every toolbar in any Microsoft Office program can be removed....Want to create your own customized toolbar containing just the icons you use often? No problem.
I know I can do this (and when I have to use Office, I do) but it's just a workaround to a problem that shouldn't be there in the first place. The clipboard with a tick in it is actually Create Outlook Task, and is placed under Reviewing. My mother (who is the Outlook user) has complained that it should be something better, such as a new item in a task list, even when I 'Customize'd and put it in the main toolbar for her. And there's no menu or shortcut equivalent that I could find that could be used instead.

Re:progress?

[afd8856]

You may be wrong about file:open and file:save being the worst candidates. I think it depends on the app. For example, for me in Corel Draw the save icon is an indicator for my save state (I tend to save every few moves, and the open icon is quite handy to avoid a few thumb-twisting moves). And anyway, my right hand sits on the mouse, so in this type of applications I think those icons cannot hurt. To tell the truth, in a new application I wouldn't be messing at first with the icons, and stick with the traditional, common ones.

Re:progress?

[moonbender]

FWIW, the Apple HIG specifically forbids icons in menus.

Really? Wow, that sucks. I mean, using only an icon in a menu would be pretty dumb, but who does that? I've never seen that in any large Windows program. But most programs provide the command icon along with the command title in a menu. That way, the next time you can easily use a toolbar icon for that command, learning by doing. (Java Swing UI guidelines mandate this, too, afaik.) Of course, if your toolbar isn't that large to begin with, there isn't much use in providing the icons in the menu.

Re:progress?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Windows default is to show an icon and part of the filename in lists, leaving off the extension. That's one of the things that drives me insane when I have to use someone else's PC. I usually change their settings to show the whole filename.

Re:progress?

[xenoandroid]

You still have the issue with the icons being small and meaningless.

Re:progress?

[xenoandroid]

Vertical menu bars? I think I'd rather have as little of my screen possible dedicated to menus, unless you're from an asian country where the written language is read from top to bottom, right to left or plan on replacing every menu text with an icon, vertical menu bars are a stupid idea. Reading english like this:

F
i
l
e

is bad UI design, as is turning the text on it's side. You want to make thing easier for users, not harder.

Re:progress?

[spitzak]

By "vertical" I meant the text would look like this:

File
Edit
View
Whatever

It is quite incredible that somebody would think that I meant turning the graphic on it's side, or turning it on it's side and rotating the letters back. But I guess it proves my point that the horizontal menubar has brainwashed the masses into believing that no alternative is possible and thus they cannot even picture it!

Re:progress?

[xenoandroid]

"I think I'd rather have as little of my screen possible dedicated to menus"

I was referring to that possibility too, it's a waste of pixels. Why would I want all that white space to the right of File, Edit, and View because Whatever has to extend the size of the bar. If you're planning on having floating text without framing it in a menu bar, things are going to start looking way too cluttered.

Re:progress?

[Echnin]

Humm, my bookmark and log menus in Safari show icons next to site names, actually. But to be fair, these are to show items, like the start menu in Windows, not functions, like Office for Windows (XP and 2003).

Re:progress?

[drsmithy]

I would much rather hunt for the function I need in a menu system which follows an organizational pattern anyone who's used a computer before should be familiar with then search through the tooltips of scores of archaic pictures for what I need.

Which you also do on Windows, so... what's your point ?

Re:progress?

[argel]

It is quite incredible that somebody would think that I meant turning the graphic on it's side, or turning it on it's side and rotating the letters back.

Kdevelop (and I guess Kate) in Ideal mode rotates the text for the vertical toolbars.

But I guess it proves my point that the horizontal menubar has brainwashed the masses into believing that no alternative is possible . . . !

Vertical toolbars with unrotated text will usually use more screen realestate than horizontal ones since we write left to right (horizontal). I suppose if you tried to group all of the toolbars on the left or the right you might be able to make it work out to about the same screen realestate.

Photoshop and Painter (8+) both use vertical (and horizontal) toolbars. And various 3D apps let you place things all over the place.

Re:progress?

[ChoccyHobNob]

I just noticed that Word 2k3 has a toolbar called "Japanese Greetings" and a total of 30 Toolbars. I think maybe they have gone a step too far. There is even an icon for M$ Foxpro as standard even though it isn't part of Office (The icon just gives an error message)

Re:progress?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd pick "B".

How often do you use most of those functions? Take web browsing: six actions account for about 99.95% of my workflow:

1) Open a link in this tab
2) Open a link in a new tab
3) Go back
4) Reload
5) Type an address into the address bar
6) Go forward

Any toolbar icons that don't facilitate one of these actions are useless to me.

Re:progress?

[rhennigan]

The only reason I'm replying to you is so that I can see the submit and preview buttons. Hmmm.. Nice buttons.

Re:progress?

[Anonymous Coward]

You ever try to read Chinese in 12pt? Take it from me, it's not a pretty sight.

Re:progress?

[moonbender]

Eh? That's windows explorer, I agree it's annoying. But it really doesn't have anything to do with the interface guidelines implemented in menu and tool bars.

Re:progress?

[be-fan]

C -- Most important functions in toolbars, with easy-to-recognize pictures, and less important functions in menus, with quick-to-recognize text.

Like in all multiple-choice tests, C is the right answer.

It's idiotic to reduce this to a "newbie" vs. "elite MS Office user (chuckle)" thing. It's a matter of efficiency --- once you put too much crap in a toolbar, recognizing a given item goes from being requiring a single-glance to requiring a linear scan. It's a matter of O(1) vs O(n).

Re:progress?

[be-fan]

The problem with overloading the toolbars is that it makes them useless. Let's go back to first principles. Why do we have toolbars? We have toolbars because it's faster to access an item out of a small linear set than a large hierharchical set. The idea is that the items you use 80% of the time should be in the toolbar, so you have to go to the menu less often. However, when you put too much crap in the toolbar, that advantage goes away. It's faster to access an item from a large hierarchical set than a large linear set. Thus, you've eliminated the very trait that made the toolbar useful in the first place!

Re:progress?

[be-fan]

1) The icons are still tiny (unlike KDE, you can't adjust the toolbar size).
2) I paid $400 for a piece of software* and you expect me to make it usable?

* Actually, I didn't. I refuse to spend good money on software that makes my documents look like utter crap.

They're too "static"

[diegocgteleline.es]

Why not .avi files instead of .png icons? Sure, it will eat more resources, but it'd be great to see a animation (a real animation, not just a .gif or a jumping/flash effect) each time I press or put the mouse over it.

Re:They're too "static"

[Anonymous Coward]

Kinda like porn icons?

Re:They're too "static"

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to have a piece of software for Windows 3.1, of all things, that let you do that. If you think it would be hard on a 2.4 ghz machine with a gig of ram, just imagine what it was like on a 486/66 with 8 megs of ram.

Re:They're too "static"

[skweegee]

Yeah I used to have the same thing, seeing this article and your post reminded me about it. Too bad I can't remember the name of the app, I'm going to google and try to reminisce.

Re:They're too "static"

[newrisejohn]

IconDoIt.

That's not a joke. That's what it was actually called. I had a copy for Win3.1.

Google for icondoit.

Re:They're too "static"

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of a VB app I worked on in the mid-90's. Another developer on the project came to me with a problem -- She wanted to know why her new form was taking so long to load. The problem ended up being that she had used a huge image for the form icon. VB saved the entire image in the resource file, and would scale the image down to the proper size at run time. You could actually see the icon being drawn from top to bottom when you loaded the form.

Re:They're too "static"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Too static"???

An icon should be a minimal, unambiguous, symbolic representation of its purpose. Early icons at least made sense.

Just what the heck does an "e" with an orbiting thingamajig mean? A "Q" with a clock hand on it? You need to reconsider your icons if you think they need to be dynamic, because you are making a grave mistake in interface design if you can't come up with a decent static icon.

Re:They're too "static"

[aftk2]

IconDoIt? :)

I imagine, on a 486 it was more like Ican'tDoIt, IDon'tHaveThePower!

Re:They're too "static"

[Touisteur]

Yeah, nice idea. Now when you'll forget not to say YES on the "'d you want to install your favorite activeX", you won't see the tiny dozen of Meg4Pr0n icons.

Instead you'll see a bunch of hot (or not so...) chicks begging you for a little (stick what you want there... err...).

Then you will understand that (future) MS Parental Filter is your solution against movicons (is it patented ?) and what means Microsoft LongHorn(y) and why slashdotters can't stand waiting for it...

No no, don't mind me, I'm not trying to give good ideas to the http://www.goatse.cx/ guy...

Re:They're too "static"

[MrP-(at work)]

I remember buying that at CompUSA back in the early 90s, for as you said win 3.x

Had a magical rabit coming out of a hat on the box if I remember correctly

I think i still have it on floppy somewhere

Re:They're too "static"

[Anonymous Coward]

Better to use SVG (infinite scalability) and the SVG animation stuff.

Re:They're too "static"

[cpt kangarooski]

IconDolt? Why would I want to use a program that was a dolt?

That's pretty bad, OK.

The more things change...

[HAKdragon]

While I can't read the article as the server is being slashdotted, I can't help feel that icons, for the most part, have stayed the same since their invention. Sure, we have icons that can be huge, have millions of colors, and have cool transparencey effects, but for the most part, Icons have remained a picture that represents an object or action. The only real innovation that I can think of when it comes to icons are ones which convey information as well as symbolize actions/items. While I'm not familiar if this exists on other icons, it's pretty easy to see on a number of iApps on OSX. For example, Mail's icon shows you how many new messages you have, iCal shows the current date, and when you're downloading files with Safari,the download icons have little progress bars on them, I love the idea of icons providing information to me realting to their particular application and hope to see that implimented more on other systems,

It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[Alternate Interior]

In the last handful of years, icons have started making a transformation from functional to stylish. Specifically, look at the differences between Windows 2000->XP icons, and Jaguar->Panther icons. In both cases, the Calculator icon illustrates specifically what I mean. In Jaguar and W2k, it was completly clear what the icon was. In Panther, however, the buttons became grayer, and as a result, the overall icon is less clear. The XP icon is much worse - it is not even distinctly a calculator.

There are many more examples in the 2k->xp comparison. The address book, for instance. What was once clearly an Address book is now just an open book. The control panel, while not exactly clear in 2k, is now a Todo list! The desktop icon went from a desk with a letter in draft to a _vertical_ oriented surface.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[stratjakt]

The XP calc icon looks like a calculator to me, even in "small icons" mode on the start menu.

But then, I have a relatively modern machine and dont run 640x480x256 any more.

I think KDE is honestly the worst culprit for icons that dont look anything like what they're supposed to be.

For example, the lifesaver thing brings up help? That's just not intuitive, since anyone with experience on any GUI would be hunting for something with a big question mark on it.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[Threni]

Stupid icons are a bit of a bugbear of mine. So often it would be more clear to simply have some text telling you what the button is/does, rather than an abstract, highly coloured blob. I like this little quote from an interview with Richard Stallman:

---
I used a word processor once. Basically I was at a hotel, and I had to type something and get it out, so I used a computer there. And it was running some word processor, which might have been Microsoft Word, I don't know. On the screen there were lots and lots of cryptic icons, whose meanings I couldn't begin to understand. If they had been English words, I might have had a chance.
---

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[tazan]

Yes, I hate the xp icons. My quicklaunch bar is now a row of indistingishable blue icons, and if that's not bad enough every few days they rotate a position or 2. My quicklaunch bar has become roulette.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[hackstraw]

Hmm, I've always considered icons those funny little pictures that I had no clue what they did until I learned their relative position in the application from their mouseover text.

I obviously could not read the article, but the Slashdot blurbette did not mention the Xerox star which started the whole WIMP (Windows Icons Menus & Pointers). In my opinion, the whole WIMP paradigm has not significantly changed since its inception in 1980 or so. The most different OS that I can tell is OS X, but even that is subtly different from Microsoft's offerings and the "Desktop Environments" for the *NIXes.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[FuturePastNow]

I have a Mac and an XP machine sitting in front of me, and I gotta say, the icons look like calculators to me.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

The KDE folks are just avoiding that pesky Matsushita patent.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[Short Circuit]

You've obviously never undestood the purposes of the equipment stored at swimming pools...

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[cowscows]

It's important to understand what icons were originally meant for, and how their use has been stretched. If you look at the original MacOS, icons were used on the desktop to represent folders, files, and applications. And very importantly, all of those also had text names written underneath them.

With the exception of the apple menu, pretty much everything else that you interacted with was plain old text. The dialog boxes may have had an icon of some sort, but you always clicked on a button that had text. The menu items were text.

It starts getting really problematic when applications start filling up huge toolbars with tiny little icons. It's a pain in the ass learning what all of those tiny buttons do, not to mention that their small size makes them hard to click quickly. This is a problem far more prevalent in windows than on Macs, even to this day. Although phpMyAdmin did that crap too in a semi-recent update, and that drives me crazy.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

> You've obviously never undestood the purposes of the equipment stored at swimming pools...

Highly idiomatic. Most people don't even see it as a lifesaver first, because it's so out of place. A questionmark is an accessible metaphor to everyone that uses the roman alphabet. Anywhere else can use their ideogram for "help" I guess.

And GNOME of course slavishly copied it.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[Quill_28]

Make your own toolbar. Seriously.
You can even put words by the icons.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Word 5 or something you have been able to create your own toolbars, and drag items off of menus onto them. Word is cluttered as hell, but it's because people are used to it.

Frankly, RMS is not one who should be talking about intiutive interfaces.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[EnglishTim]

I hate the bloody KDE help.

Mainly because all KDE applications seem to have a 'help' menu item, but when you press it THERE IS NO HELP.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[Doctor Crumb]

Really? Hmm.

[Help | Kopete handbook] (or hit F1) ...

Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. Getting Started
3. Using Kopete
4. Configuring Kopete ...

I'm not sure what apps you're using , but my KDE apps certainly have excellent documentation available through the help menu. I actually use it once in a while, as opposed to windows apps where I know there will be nothing useful and don't even bother trying.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[Doctor Crumb]

Decent(recent?) apps tend to have tooltips that pop up when you point at the icons. It makes it considerably less painful to use such GUIs. Tooltips should really be required by all interface guidelines. As a bonus, if the programmer has to think of a nice short tooltip, they might manage to think of a better icon while they're at it.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[spitzak]

Are you kidding? There are a lot of KDE/Gnome applications where picking help gets you irrelevant or useless information. I am afraid too many of the developers think it is ok if some HTML document appears.

Most recent example is in Gnome control panel, I picked "Sessions", and I got a little window with a "Help" button. I hit that "Help" button and I got a page "Part I Setting Appearance and Personal Preference...". This document did a great job of describing *some* of the items on the Control panel, and would perhaps be acceptable for a "Help" button *ON THE CONTROL PANEL* (which unfortunatly did not have a help button...). However it did not have a chapter on the "Sessions" popup, and I wasted time seeing if it was buried in one of the other chapters.

Suggested improvement to the GUI: if no help is written, pop up a message that says "no help is available". To be really clever, have it google for answers (that would actually work pretty good for Linux, too!). Don't pop up a page of other text.

I have to say it is incredibly annoying that "man" from 1970 still works better for getting information than any of these modern systems. With "man" I can quickly and unambigously determine if the information exists (so I don't waste time looking for nonexistent stuff), and if it does it always has the information I need (ie it lists *how to run that command*).

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[billh]

Some apps seem to have a help entry that tells you absolutely nothing about the app or how to use it.

A quick check (KDE 3.2):
Konquest: Useless and out of date
Kedit: Nice
Kmplayer: Nothing useful
Kate: Good
Kmenuedit: Sparse, but looks like enough

Not that I think Windows apps have better help, but that doesn't make KDE help any better.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[Ki Master George]

At least the new ones are pretty. That's all that matters.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[nine-times]

I've also noticed that there's been a big move to "photorealistic" icons, despite the fact that a more simple/symbolic icon would often be more quickly recognizable and easier to distinguish from other things. It's not even as though symbolic icons can't be as pretty as the photorealistic ones, but I guess people want to pretend they're interacting with real objects or something.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say reading the text that is shown when an application starts is quite intuitive...

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[pinchhazard]

The other responders to the parent have it all wrong. RMS is not pointing out any flaw in the word processor. He just has trouble understanding certain concepts, like everyone does.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[Porter Doran]

It's a pretty brilliant artist that can do both -- photorealism and strong symbolism -- and I don't know that anyone but whomever it was Apple hired has pulled it off effectively. I'm looking at my Dock now, and pretty much every icon fails in one way or the other except the Apple apps icons. Maybe this is actually a failure on Apple's part -- raising the bar too high.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

... whose meanings I couldn't begin to understand.

I wonder how he drives a car.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[MustardMan]

Frankly, RMS is not one who should be talking about intiutive interfaces.

NO SHIT! Clicking a picture of a disk to save is a lot more intuitive than typing control-x, control-s. And if you can't figure out that the disk is for saving, you might think... hey, "file" might do things with my file, I'll click that, and hey look here it says "save", I wonder if that saves things

Hell, I even like emacs, but Stallman criticizing user interfaces is like Carrot Top criticizing fine theater.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Emacs has neither a menu bar nor a toolbar right?

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[Cthefuture]

I've done a lot of research on this particular subject (icons vs. text) and this is what I found:

- Icons/graphics are best for saving screen space.

- Text is best for beginners and rarely used functions. Most of the time plain text is more appropriate than a picture. This is true even when working across language barriers. Ever hear the expression "A picture says a thousand words"? Yeah, that is not what you want.

So, to make a proper application you should default to text and then allow the user to switch whichever buttons they choose to graphical representations as they become more experienced (hello GNOME developers?! with your "Computer" and "Applications" menus that I can't put on the side of the screen).

Also, even text buttons should have "tool tips" or they should update a status bar with a longer explaination of the button's function.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[MustardMan]

The accesibility of said menu or tool bar depends heavily on which version of emacs you use. Obviously you can't click a menu button on a command line version, but the menu system on the command line version is far from intuitive, and the graphical versions aren't much better.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[stratjakt]

Not many people living in desert states like Arizona or Texas would. Lot's of people don't know how to swim, and have never been on a boat.

Everyone who speaks a latin language knows what a question mark means.

It makes as much sense as a picture of a dog because seeing eye dogs "help people find their way".

I get the metaphor they're making, it's just stupid and unintuitive.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

The graphical version has a standard GUI menu, I don't understand what you are complaining about. You have to start Emacs with '-nw' to even get at the non-gui version in a modern distribution so its menu is a non-isue as far as 'intuitivenes' is concerned.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[J053]

I have to say it is incredibly annoying that "man" from 1970 still works better for getting information than any of these modern systems. With "man" I can quickly and unambigously determine if the information exists (so I don't waste time looking for nonexistent stuff), and if it does it always has the information I need (ie it lists *how to run that command*).

What's even more annoying is the tendency of application developers to NOT include a man page - expecting the user to either use their "Help" button (which, as the OP pointed out, is often useless) or, worse, hunt throught /usr/share/docs in hope of finding something relevant.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[spitzak]

Good point. Even a man page that says "the docs are in /blah/foo/index.html" or even directed you to a public website, would be better than nothing.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[BobNET]

I wonder how he drives a car.

I wonder how he shaves.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[splatg]

That particular example isn't a problem anymore, I just tried it in gnome 2.10 and it took me to a page on configuring sessions in the help browser.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[lostchicken]

Everybody knows how to swim in Texas. It's too fucking hot outside here to do much else.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[wickedsteve]

It's just hardware advancements. The screens in 85 were so low res the icons had to be small. Good interface design says a larger target (like an icon for example) is better and easier to hit. Todays monitors hold a lot more pixels. Hence Apple OS X icons have more resiolution which allows more realism.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[ookaze]

And you think you and the GP post are clever.

You will then explain to me how you save your document in Emacs in a terminal with no mouse (and no GUI), where Emacs works perfectly well.

Given that Emacs do the right thing most of the time (because often, Emacs actually guess what it should do, perhaps you did not notice)and that it can handle most tasks efficiently with all the keyboards key, I think you should not dismiss RMS so fast on intuitive interfaces.

FYI, most newbie computer users can read (and there is a tutorial in Emacs), but most can't even use a mouse, and take time to even associate the mouse with the icon on the screen.
I mean, Emacs can be self-taught, using a GUI is much more difficult at first (we are talking intuitive, not familiar interfaces).

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[Threni]

How about having text in place of the icon, and have a stupid coloured blob appear when you move the mouse over the text. Note: it should be possible to turn off the tooltip, so you don't see stupid coloured blobs when you move the mouse over the text.

Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago

[drsmithy]

Stupid icons are a bit of a bugbear of mine. So often it would be more clear to simply have some text telling you what the button is/does, rather than an abstract, highly coloured blob.

The primary objective of toolbar icons is not to be intuitive, but to be rememberable. Toolbar icons are meant to be used as *shortcuts*.

I like this little quote from an interview with Richard Stallman

And, naturally, arbitrary, unobvious vulcan nerve-pinches of key combinations are so much more superior.

Of course, had RMS actually been interested in learning something instead of creating an anecdote, he could have looked at bit higher for the menu bar, and all the "English words" he could want.

ICO

[justforaday]

i loved that game... : p

(Score:-5,offtopic as hell)

Susan Kare - Icon Artist

[YorgleLlama]

If you like icons, you should check out Susan Kare's page She made most of the original MacOS icons, as well as most of the original Windows icons. Lots of great pixel art.

Re:Susan Kare - Icon Artist

[Anonymous Coward]

Good catch! Kare is a true artist.

BTW, the /. summary implies that Lisa's GUI preceded the Mac. Not so. Raskin's Macintosh project contributed the GUI to Lisa -- which was planned to have only an Apple ][ style CLI -- after Jobs finally got convinced that graphical is the way to go. Which wasn't trivially easy.

(Google up "Jef Raskin" for some of the lost history. Observe how Raskin's university work on humane and ergonomic computer interfaces precedes the founding of PARC, and how his actual work interleaved theirs. And be amused or bemused by "T.H.E."... and ph34r the Canon Cat! Too bad Jobs smoked him out of Apple. An interesting character, and one of the real icons of interface design.)

Re:Susan Kare - Icon Artist

[DrewCapu]

Susan: I'm thinking of writing a book.
Publisher: What's the title?
Susan: "Icon Artist"
Publisher: Hmm, a spoof on "I, Robot?" Are you trying to con me?
Susan: I said "Icon Artist," not "I, Con Artist!"
Publisher: Yeah, I heard you the first time, the second time, and the third time.
Susan: Nevermind. You, idiot.

Re:Susan Kare - Icon Artist

[thogard]

So why does her windows 3.1 control panel icon clearly show an early amiga complete with one of their early start up screens?
Its shown here.

Re:Susan Kare - Icon Artist

[Spire]

Susan Kare didn't make any of the original Windows icons. She had no involvement with Windows until Windows 3.0.

Re:Susan Kare - Icon Artist

[YorgleLlama]

That icon was never used on the amgia. The amiga never had a startup screen that looked anything remotely close to that. I think she was just making a computer that was colorful. (That's not even an amiga mouse)

Re:Susan Kare - Icon Artist

[Anonymous Coward]

The red/yellow/green were the early Amgia colors. And why the A?

Re:Susan Kare - Icon Artist

[Anonymous Coward]

Amiga's earliest logo was the checkered-ball, followed by the full-rainbow checkmark. The Windows icon in question uses Red/yellow/cyan. It was common (and still is, in Windows XP) to signify font settings with the letter "A" in italics. Also, the Amiga 1000 mouse had hard edges, not rounded ones.

Re:Susan Kare - Icon Artist

[thogard]

You mean this check and Italics A? The ball didn't even show up until they started shipping lots of units and Commodore never liked it so it wasn't an official logo for long, it was more of a symbol. The edges are going to disappear on a small icon.

Orthodoxy Sunday

[stoolpigeon]

Was this last sunday - maybe it is an annual holiday type thing. (Yes I know-- they aren't related but shouldn't they be?)

The dominant theme of this Sunday since 843 has been that of the victory of the icons. In that year the iconoclastic controversy, which had raged on and off since 726, was finally laid to rest, and icons and their veneration were restored on the first Sunday in Lent. Ever since, that Sunday been commemorated as the "triumph of Orthodoxy."

Orthodox teaching about icons was defined at the Seventh Ecumenical Council of 787, which brought to an end the first phase of the attempt to suppress icons. That teaching was finally re-established in 843, and it is embodied in the texts sung on this Sunday.

Re:Orthodoxy Sunday

[Anonymous Coward]

Which brings to mind a former co-worker of mine, whose organization style was a bit.. lacking. A visitor once exclaimed, "Your desktop has more icons than the Orthodox Church!"

Re:Orthodoxy Sunday

[Ugmo]

This past Sunday was not the first Sunday in Lent, it was the last Sunday (Palm Sunday) at least according to the Catholic Church but icons and iconoclasts were a big Eastern Orthodox issue and maybe you are referring to Greek Easter so your dates could be right.

Re:Orthodoxy Sunday

[stoolpigeon]

yeah - eastern orthodox. and though it may imperil my karma-- it was a joke though somebody thought it was insightful. oh well-- what are you gonna do? Karma is fitting I guess since this balances out the times I was modded down unfairly (in my mind).

Icons were a big issue in the great schism. But I am not eastern orthodox or roman catholic so I could have botched up the whole thing entirely. My apologies if this is so.

Re:Orthodoxy Sunday

[Anonymous Coward]

The Sunday of Orthodoxy is the church admitting it was wrong to have participated in iconoclasm (literally, a breaking of icons) which was begun because of contact with Islam, which believed all images were wrong. It was the Western part of Christendom, specifically the Popes who supported the veneration of icons. Now, how often does your church admit they were wrong? One of the cool aspects of Orthodoxy. Of course, the Orthodox never accepted the use of statuary, but that may be because the Greeks who were the major players in Eastern Christendom rememberd all those pagan idols they put up generations before.

Re:Orthodoxy Sunday

[FCon4]

Could be that I'm a sicko, but this is one of the funniest posts I've read in some time.

Here is a free Icon Editor

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Shell_and_Deskt op/Icon_Editing_Tools/Icon_EDITor.html

It is fairly basic, admittedly, and only supports sizes up to 64x64, but it's free. Doesn't seem to be supported anymore though...

Coral links

[spin2cool]

How hard is it to use coral links? Editors - why aren't you automatically append ".nyud.net:8090" to any url? How hard is that, really?.

Sigh...

Re:Coral links

[Anonymous Coward]

Mods, why is this offtopic? Since the site was slashdotted within minutes of the story appearing, it seems pretty freakin' relevant to me. How are we supposed to discuss this? Is it a wonder people don't read the articles when they're slashdotted half the time? I think Coral links are a great idea for smaller sites.

Re:Coral links

[Anonymous Coward]

My company's proxy blocks sites that operate on a port other than 80 due to the fact you might be trying to avoid the inhouse one. In other words I can't go to nyud.net:8090.

Re:Coral links

[canavan]

And even if they didn't put it in the links (hey, somebody could whore some karma), they could at least seed coral cache by loading the page through it once. It's dead now, and the copy in the coral cache reads:

Due to techical problems this page is currently unavailable.

Please try after a while - we will do our best to resolve this issue as soon as possible.

Re:Coral links

[Short Circuit]

I'm not sure, but I suspect it might have something to do with banner ads. Do the original banner ad links get preserved, or does nyud.net cache the first banner image it sees?

If the image gets cached, DoubleClick isn't going to notice that one of its banner-displaying sites just had thousands of page views per minute.

Re:Coral links

[squiggleslash]

Because it's difficult to access those links when you're stuck behind corporate firewalls. Coral uses port 8090, a non-standard port that most firewalls are unaware of and block.

It's like a restaurant. You're stuck with the menu the restaurant has. Now, it's not that you can't necessarily get the kitchen to do a ham and cheese, but you have to do it in terms it understands (for example, you can order a burger that has ham and cheese, and order it without the beefburger, salad, etc), kind of like h[tt]p:, which runs on port 80. You can do it via the firewall, but it has to look like an HTTP request, which means running it on port 80. You can then say "Ohh, it's not really a burger, it's a ham and cheese sandwich" but as far as the kitchen's concerned, it's just one of their regular burgers. You might look at port 8090 as the ham - they're likely to have cheese burgers, but a ham, cheese, and beef burger? Not likely. So you can't have your ham and cheese because you haven't come up with a sandwich that really works within the framework you're given.

The only option is to leave the restaurant, and cook your own sandwich, but that's not always an option, especially if you actually work at the restaurant so can't leave until 5pm, but you're a waiter or you work at the bar or you greet people or wash up or something so you can't actually make the sandwich yourself (well, not in a unionized restaurant anyway. A union-free restaurant might allow it, but you don't want to upset the staff, and it's probably going against company policy.)

Port 8090 isn't supported by most corporate firewalls, so making all URLs point at it would just prevent Slashdot's working readers (the vast majority) from "eating their ham and cheese sandwich" - or, in other words, accessing the website. This would damage Slashdot long term as people would just stop reading it except for a few people at Universities and in Cybercafes, neither of which are appealing to Slashdot's advertisers.

Re:Coral links

[ggvaidya]

Also, clicks are probably great for advertising. A good slashdotting can get you over 200,000 hits in a single day, or around 6,000 potential customers. Advertisers will like those numbers.

Re:Coral links

[mooingyak]

The problem I have with your post is that I think this situation is a lot closer to being a 'Ham and Swiss' scenario, rather than the more generic 'Ham and Cheese' scenario that you've laid out. If you think about that some, you'll see why this could all work.

Re:Coral links

[Anonymous Coward]

Most crack-addled analogy. Ever! :)

Seriously, dude. They're meant to make things *clearer*, you know.

I'm going to have horribly fucked up nightmares tonight involving hamburgers and cheese that aren't, or something. I hope you're happy.

Re:Coral links

[hacker]

"All my posts are valid XHTML. Too bad Slashdot isn't."

I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but your posts, and your blog site mentioned in your .sig, are not valid XHTML. You are presenting them with the Content-Type of text/html, which is HTML4.01, not XHTML.

Also, your blog doesn't validate cleanly either. You are sending a DOCTYPE of XHTML, but a Content-Type of HTML. You might want to pick one, and stick with it, and then begin to validate the content presented with it.

Lastly, while you're wondering, the correct Content-Type for XHTML is 'application/xhtml+xml', not 'text/html'. Just be aware that MSIE doesn't support XHTML at all, so you may want to stick with HTML4.01 for now, if you have MSIE users.

Re:Coral links

[Anonymous Coward]

> Editors - why aren't you automatically append ".nyud.net:8090" to any url?

Some people have responded that's because of firewalls but that's a lame excuse: you can perfectly put a Coral link AND a standard link next to it for high-port-challenged persons. The problem is different. It's called the "I Must Be Doing Something Right Syndrome" (IMBDSRS), and it basically happens when you find yourself running a venture that happens to have a fair share of success. Its main symptom is that you no longer listen to people who ask for changes (even little ones) or enhancements because you look at your stats and, seeing that despite the complaints, people still come to your site in droves, you decide that it must be that you're doing it right.

On slashdot, the IMBDSRS has attained unheard-of proportions. People bitch and moan about so much things, you can hardly keep track of all shortcomings: the site uses invalid, broken HTML; the lameness filter and other antitroll devices just make posting difficult (I still cannot use perfectly standard characters like French guillemots or em dashes because they're filtered for some reason. Nor can I use handy HTML tags like <acronym>); the stories are more often than not dupes (sometimes of a story that was submitted very shortly ago); there is ZERO fact-checking, even on preposterous claims; it's also obvious no grammar and spelling checks are done, and I've seen numerous occurrences of a "story" being simply a paragraph lifted from the original article; people have been known to post advertisements as news (*cough* Roland Piquepaille *cough*); the editorial policy (if it exists) is very muddy, what is primarily peddled as a technology site sometimes drifts around topics that are certainly not "news for nerds" (the Politics section is probably the pinnacle of completely awkward and unrelated editorial content, not to mention non-US visitors couldn't care less); the moderation system is quite bad, and the nesting/reparenting thing frequently renders threads hard to follow (e.g., when there have been several posts beneath your threshold between to that are above it), and so on.

Actually, I could probably go on and on finding other problems, but basically this is useless. As I said above, the IMBDSRS blinds the editors, and they will think they're right no matter what people say. Note that many issues are really simple to solve (adding an additional Coral cache link to every link in a story could be done automatically at posting time, for instance), but I bet you won't see it happen anytime soon. *Sigh*, indeed...

Re:Coral links

[CylanR77]

To everyone on a corporate firewall, just suck it up.

Either just figure out the url to the original content, stop reading slashdot at work and get some *work* done, convince your administrators/managers that you should be allowed to view content on a nonstandard port so you can spend more company time browsing the web, or leave and find a different job.

For a website which is devoted to shoveling up information for the most elitist of all computer-literate people [including some bright individuals], you'd think that somehow, a better system could be put into place than "bomb websites with loads of traffic, indiscriminantly".

Re:Coral links

[1110110001]

How about having coral run at port 80 instead of making everyone else change their firewall.

b4n

Re:Coral links

[squiggleslash]

For a website which is devoted to shoveling up information for the most elitist of all computer-literate people [including some bright individuals], you'd think that somehow, a better system could be put into place than "bomb websites with loads of traffic, indiscriminantly".

That's what Coral is supposed to fix. You could at least be consistant, either tell office workers they shouldn't complain about not being able to use Coral, and rejoice in the overloading of servers this results in, or support Coral changing to a more regular port.

Biblical Icons

[mfh]

Don't forget the Biblical Icons. That Golden Calf must have some pretty great raytracing and high polys to be worshipped so blatantly at the risk of utter destruction.

Re:Biblical Icons

[fiendracer]

Don't you mean "udder" destruction?

Nothing to see here, mooove on...

here you go

[Anonymous Coward]

.ico export format plugin for photoshop/paintshop
http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/

Win/Mac GPL FOSS

Whoa, deja vu.

[roman_mir]

-A story was posted on /. and then another story that looked just like it.
-How much like it, was it the same story?
-Might have been, I'm not sure.

A deja vu is usually a glitch in the /. It happens when they change something.

Heard of Google Cache?

[JaF893]

Google Cache of the page

Re:Heard of Google Cache?

[Psychotext]

True enough... but it's not going to stop the bulk of slashdot viewers killing the main site. These cache links need to be put automatically into the submitted stories.

If you like icons

[titaniam]

Then see my site iconsurf.com where hundreds of thousands of icons are displayed to help you surf the internet.

Re:If you like icons

[JawzX]

I'm not sure why, but it's fun.

google IMAGE cache

[mzs]

You can click here for a google image search that returns the pictures:

cached thumbnails

Unfortunately the site is ./ed so it will not do much good to actually click on any of the thumbnails. The good news is that so many of the thumbnails are of icons that in effect the cached thumbnails are essentially full-size :)

Enjoy...

Mirror on Archive.org

[Dugsmyname]

It's slow, but at least it's still up! Archive.Org Mirror

no icons in linux

[latroM]

Unless you include that penguin logo on boot. The graphical desktops have icons, not some kernels.

Re:no icons in linux

[AssHatAnonymous]

You're an idiot. If you want to prove you aren't an idiot, then this is what you have to do. Run Linux the kernel. Nothing else. If it's not in the tarball you download from kernel.org you can't run it. Then when you've got that running, come back here and post and I'll put up a huge retraction, even send you $1,000,000.00. However, since I know you'll never come to claim your reward, I'd like to continue with the berating and humilating of a moron. Without programs like gcc, the Linux kernel is just so much source code and does nothing whatsoever except take up space on disk. Without programs like grub and lilo, even the compiled version does nothing but sit and occupy disk space. Without mke2fs it doesn't even have a file system to organize itself within. Without init all it does is initialize some hardware and then panic and reboot. Without ifconfig (or a remote dhcp/bootp server) it's wholy unable to configure a network device. All of these things, when coupled with the kernel that Linus Torvalds started, is called Linux. When a normal, socially mature person talks about Linux, they are talking about a unix like system with a linux kernel and a large assorted userland. It's just hilarious when the clever little freshman nerds start saying "Linux is a kernel!" Sorry you cretin, "Linux" may be the kernel Linus began, but Linux is an OS. So grow up. Stop trying to show all the other nerds that you are the alpha-nerd and enter society. Maybe you'll see some boobies in real life then.

Re:no icons in linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you're the idiot here.

I install Debian. Does it have any icons by default? No. Once I install a desktop environment (GNOME, KDE, Xfce) a set of icons specific to that environment gets installed. (Or apt-get install an icon-set package).

Every Linux distro has different icons. Some of them just use the desktop environment's icons. Some have their own sets. Some of them pioneered the icon sets. In all of them I can completely change my icon set by installing a new one and telling GNOME/KDE/Xfce to use it instead.

However, those environments are not specific to Linux... they run on all UNIX and UNIX-like systems. Hence, it would be far more appropriate to talk about different desktop environments' icons... since something like Debian which can be installed without them has no icons.

There is no "Linux OS". There are hundreds of different Linux distros... but none of them is the "Linux OS". There is no standard icon set like there is in the MacOS and Windows world.

Re:no icons in linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Classic.

Am I missing X icons or what?

[A nonymous Coward]

Please inform me. I was using X on SunOS in 1989. Did it have icons and this page is missing X altogether, or is my memory playing tricks and X hasn't had icons until recently?

Re:Am I missing X icons or what?

[linguae]

X by itself doesn't provide icons; window managers do, however. I believe twm (one of the early window managers) had icons.

how about mirroring the icons, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you post a mirror, I suggest you will
choose one also mirroring the images, especialy
if it is about an article about images...

Re:how about mirroring the icons, too?

[Dugsmyname]

Patience is a virtue!

While we wait for the flames to go out...

[The_Rippa]

Enjoy an article about designing those full color icons we so cherish today...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?ur l= /library/en-us/dnwxp/html/winxpicons.asp

Informative page, who says microsoft is 100% evil?!

Re:While we wait for the flames to go out...

[Horrortaxi]

Informative page, who says microsoft is 100% evil?!

1.) I got a 404 on that page. 2.) I do.

Re:While we wait for the flames to go out...

[Anonymous Coward]

Remove Slashcode-inserted space from URL.

Re:While we wait for the flames to go out...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fantastic... the world no. 1 sw. corp. do NOT have their own icon editing tool...

Re:While we wait for the flames to go out...

[srmalloy]

Fantastic... the world no. 1 sw. corp. do NOT have their own icon editing tool...

No, what's incredible is that, with the tool that they use being an outside product, they haven't followed established practice by buying out the company, integrating the icon-editing tool into their own product line, creating a 'standard' icon format that is an industry-standard file format with 'extensions' specific to their product, and either doubled the price or bundled it with their OS, claiming that it's an 'integral part of the system and can't be removed' when companies making competing icon-editing tools complain.

Re:While we wait for the flames to go out...

[David Taylor]

You got a space in there somewhere... try

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/dnwxp/html/winxpicons.asp

Re:While we wait for the flames to go out...

[David Taylor]

Hmm, no matter what I do that space won't go away. Sorry.

Re:While we wait for the flames to go out...

[Anonymous Coward]

The URL in the hyperlink will work, but Slashcode will insert a space in any long displayed URL to prevent users (trolls) forcing wide pages.

Wow...

[Patrick Mannion]

I never knew that so many Slashdotters had an intrest in icons, so much that it brings down a DAMN SITE ON THE HISTORY OF ICONS! You people have no lives, of course then again, neither do I.

Re:Wow...

[cowscows]

Yeah, learning a little about something that many of us interact with for hours upon hours of every day sure is strange.

The easy spread of information as obscure as the history of icons is what makes the internet so cool. I'm glad such things are available (or at least will be when the current barrage of traffic slows).

and then there is Adobe...

[Anonymous Coward]

The latest in their progression of Acrobat icons is just plain ugly!

Re:The more things change...

[sepelester]

Well, the icons in windows' systray have popup bubbles showing how many new mails you've got, the status of your firewall etc. As for Linux/Gnome, there's the notification area applet doing the same thing (except it's not bloated with flashing icons for non-critical messages).

NextStep had this feature back in '96 I think (Icon changed when you recieved an email). At least I think so, I first tried AfterStep back then.

Another neat feature is that if you interact with the icon, it can turn into a full window, showing a whole range of information!

Where are the default gnome icons?

[arose]

I find them better than most of the icons included in the article.

Re:Where are the default gnome icons?

[BenjyD]

Me too

Lots of people seem to complain about the default GNOME icons, but they do one thing that so many 'prettier' icon sets fail to do: they allow me to quickly distinguish between them.

No, it wasn't.

[Anonymous Coward]

See comment above.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=143326 &cid=120 13344
Amiga with some extensions (MagicWB) was the top of the line of icon quality/functionality/robustness. After that Windows with its ugly primitive icons came and no progress was made, except of increasing color depth and adding antialiasing. But the modern systems never recovered to the Amiga levels. The regression wasn't undone.

Bad joke about icons (believe it or not)

[sczimme]

Q. Once upon a time a mouse became trapped in a Russian cathedral; how did he escape?

A. He clicked on an icon and opened a window.

(I can't claim credit for that one...)

Re:Bad joke about icons (believe it or not)

[Gulthek]

(I can't claim credit for that one...)

Would you want to?

Re:Bad joke about icons (believe it or not)

[Beardo the Bearded]

Since he didn't post anonymously we can infer that he did want to take credit for the joke.

Joke?

[Anonymous Coward]

Q: Why is Judy Garland like a cute little picture on an Apple Mac?
A: Because they're both gay icons.

Man, that was lame... sorry.

The GIMP

[Heliode]

The Gimp lets you create .ico files just fine. I use the Windows version of The GIMP whenever I really need to build icons for Windows.

Only icons I need

[utlemming]

The only icon that I need is #
Maybe > but only temporarily until I get to #

another false story filed

[GarbanzoBean]

The GUIdebook has a great page illustrating the history of icons.

Yet again, the Slashdot editors have allowed a mispelled story to be posted. It should be had.

Icon progess...

[linebackn]

I'm not sure I would call everything that has happened to icons progress.

Now that icons are commonly 24 bit color or more and use complex shading and styles they are often more difficult to identify at a glance than 2-color monochrome icons. (Icons should always be capable of being represented as a 2-color monochrome icons to ensure they have enough visual contrast)

And with all of the varying styles these days, if you don't make your icons specific to each operating environment then they stick out like sore a thumb.

The days of 16-color icons were probably the best because you could make a decent icon without having to be an artist or having an expensive paint program.

It still boggles my mind how many people choose bad icons for their products. I currently have the joy of working with a particular software product where many of the different configuration tools all have slightly different pictures of little computer... looking things with some kind of network dealy around them, and I keep getting them all mixed up. Of course part of the problem is that the programs aren't very well organized to begin with and the fact that they keep changing the program names in each version proves that.

Anyway, it is important that any application have a clear distinct purpose, a good icon to reflect that purpose and then to stick with it as people learn what it symbolized.

Remember, Icons literally become a language to people!

Slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

They should have an icon for slashdotted servers

Re:Slashdotted

[maxwell demon]

I can even imagine what it could look like. A big hammer hammering onto a server, where the shaft of the hammer forms the slash of the slashdot sign (i.e. there's the dot part right of it).

Yes, but ...

[A nonymous Coward]

Why the paltry examples under Solaris? That page seems to imply *nix didn't have icons until way after all the others.

People Could I have your attention?

[danalien]

for a tiny-winy bit.

DISCLAIMER: This is off-topic, yet related.

Now that I have it, all I wanted to say is that we (the 'slashdotters') need to agree to some common courtesy.
Yes, I'm talking about the 'slashdot effect'.

That each time we, who post something, take the 'common courtesy' of at least Coral CDN [mirror it].

And, no it's not that hard at all, either!

all that 'we' have to do is: http://redirect.nyud.net:8090/?url=${SUBSTITUTE_WI TH_URL} (see footnotes for more info...)

See, not that hard, really. If it wheren't I would have taken *this time to ask for you attention.

----

*) ...and if you got 'Konqueror' create a (new) shortcut (like so):
'Searh provider name' == 'Coral CDN' (or enter your own name :P)
'Search URI' == 'http://redirect.nyud.net:8090/?url=\{@}'
'URI shortcuts' == 'cdn,mirror,mirr' (or, again, pick your own 'web shortcuts' :P)

so, now all you konqi's have to do is 'mirr: ${URL} '

*) .. and for all you Firefox'rs, here's a searchplugin for you'vs too: coral.src & coral.gif [add them to your 'Mozilla Searchplugins'-dir]

*) .. and you with other browser, I don't know much about others to comment about. But if you use an enhanced browser (eg. not-IE :-) *blow below the belt, I know, I know =)*), you might be able to add it yourself, someway, like with 'Konqueror'. But I wouldn't know about it, so I leave this up to you'vs.

Re:People Could I have your attention?

[dacarr]

Howsabout instructions on getting around firewalls? Like was indicated earlier, most firewalls block port 8090.

Re:People Could I have your attention?

[randyest]

Right; it's not hard. But it rarely works. Like now. Coral gives:

Due to techical problems this page is currently unavailable.

Please try after a while - we will do our best to resolve this issue as soon as possible

And mirrordot is slashdotted.

Any more ideas you can present to us in that super pedantic manner?

Re:People Could I have your attention?

[cipher uk]

the links could be in the fashion

corallink [*]

or something similar. ofcourse the link[domain] protection isn't in 'news' summaries.

Re:People Could I have your attention?

[danalien]

um', not the bestest of answers/solutions, but, it'll work, I hope :)

Re:People Could I have your attention?

[danalien]

hehe :)

1st) it's hard to mirror, if the target URL has been slashdotted prior to CoralCDN-mirroring it...*but you knew that*

2nd) ... and it's also hard to mirror a target URL if CoralCDN has been slashdotted, too. [CoralCDN in my eye's is still a quite a 'green' project (needs more exposure to grow), but it sure has got potential of becoming something great!]

3rd) .. or it could be something with your (closest) node ... or something

Re:People Could I have your attention?

[danalien]

or, *d'ooh*

4th) ... that's what the CoralCDN mirrored, =), *just* priror to the server's meltdown :)

Re:People Could I have your attention?

[moodboom]

coralcdn.org: "Due to techical problems this page is currently unavailable. Please try after a while - we will do our best to resolve this issue as soon as possible."

Somebody mod the parent Funny. I think I can smell Coral CDN burning from here...

doh...

[diegocgteleline.es]

...I got moderated as "funny", despite being a realistic propose.

OK, now imagine: I put the mouse over the icon. If I left there x seconds, system shows you a big (say 300x200 or something) video at the left of how the app looks when its running. Or show the video as background, or something. Sure it'll take resources, but is not a bad idea IMHO...

Re:doh...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Upgrade to OS X. Icons change to show information. In column view a preview of many file types is available. If you have a movie file playing and minimize it a thumbnail of it continues to play in the dock. If you mouse over it it magnifies (if you have that feature enabled). Files being downloaded or tasks being computed generally show a progress bar on the icon when minimized. This is much more useful than a generic movie of how an app looks. For the most part people know what any application they plan to run does. Providing useful feedback in the form of dynamic icons is very useful, and is the norm on OS X.

Re:doh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you said .avi files so of course no one took you seriously. .avi is one shitty old container that should've died long ago.

Re:doh...

[drsmithy]

Upgrade to OS X. Icons change to show information. In column view a preview of many file types is available.

Ah. Just like Windows ca. 1997.

If you have a movie file playing and minimize it a thumbnail of it continues to play in the dock. If you mouse over it it magnifies (if you have that feature enabled).

*Some* apps do. Quicktime player (ugh) does, neither VLC nor the Apple DVD player do.

Providing useful feedback in the form of dynamic icons is very useful, and is the norm on OS X.

I wouldn't go quite that far. It's common, but not the "norm".

Not to mention the types of things you are talking about have a very different purpose to the proposal of the parent.

Re:doh...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Upgrade to OS X. Icons change to show information. In column view a preview of many file types is available.
Ah. Just like Windows ca. 1997.

Funny, I have a Win2K box sitting in front of me that won't let me play previews of mp3s, movies, and can't show me a preview of my photoshop files.

*Some* apps do.

True, but it is up to the application developer. The hooks are there and even built into the dev tools. The state of the art is there, just many developers are not very interested in a polished interface. Gee, what a surprise, crappy UI programming.

..the types of things you are talking about have a very different purpose to the proposal of the parent.

Yes, they are useful more than one time. The parent's proposal was that icons should be more useful and one way they could be more useful was to show a movie of the app running. That is fine, but not really very useful for most icons compared to the kinds of feedback they are actually capable of. I explained this in my post.

hmm?

[numbski]

You enjoy having girls follow you around mindlessly, yet they must always have their 2 feet of personal space?

Re:hmm?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, yes I do.

Whats the icon...

[first.last]

...for a burning server?

Re:Deja Vu (Slashdotted)

[supergiovane]

Awesome! The post you mention is one year old and the link is STILL SLASHDOTTED!

Icons for software development

[KIngo]

Until recently, I've found it quite difficult to find decent icons for software development. As a software developer I have a natural inability to draw anything that remotely resembles the intended object and the free icon collections on the internet made my applications look like frankenstein clones.

Fortunately, nowadays the situation has improved considerably. You can find a lot of useful BSD-licensed icons in the eclipse project, most of them are quite IDE-related, but with a little bit of imagination you can use them in lots of different situations.

If you have some money to spend, you can buy the icon collections from Incors. They're really great Windows XP-style icons for a very reasonable price.

Re:Icons for software development

[hyperizer]

There's also stockicons.com.

Re:Icons for software development

[Brandybuck]

Try the KDE Classic icons. No inappropriate (L)GPL crap, just a blanket permission to use them for any purpose commercial or noncommercial.

Pshaw, 3d icons man

[phorm]

The windows explorer already has such functionality on the sidebar. If you're "exploring" it will show an image/video preview window on the bar for known formats.

Personally if we're going to monopolize resources for the GUI, I'd rather see a 3d interface and meshed icons. If you think that the bouncing/zooming icons are sweet how cool would a 3d rotating one be? :-)

Truth is Beauty

[Doc Ruby]

Aesthetic progress, sure. Functional progress? Well, every icon represents a file. Why aren't the complete file operations available for that file available by clicking the icon? Why isn't it obvious by looking at a file icon which apps can process it? Why aren't different modes for reading and writing apparent from the app icons? Why aren't there very obvious differences between data, logic and presentation file icons? Why can't I draw pipes and redirects among the icons, making a graph like the one simulated in a commandline with "|" and "" characters? Not to mention no way to start an app in the background by its icon. And don't get me started on representing permissions, ownership, in-use status, or any other state metadata.

As icons have progressed, we've evolved some very stable patterns in using the files which they represent. But all that these icons communicate is that a file exists, in a given storage subdivision (folder), with some clues to its datatype. If half the time spent beautifying icons were spent making them work better, more interactive, more representational of the full state of the file and its context, we'd all be more productive.

Re:Truth is Beauty

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

But all that these icons communicate is that a file exists, in a given storage subdivision (folder), with some clues to its datatype.

I have three OS's in front of me right now. Two of them have icons more or less the same as in the 90's. One is different. If you want useful icons, you want OS X. My mail icon tells me how many unread messages I have. My minimized windows indicate what application they are associated with and a thumbnail of the window. My calendar app shows the date. Downloading files show a progress bar. Minimized movies show, well the movie, still playing, or still if paused. Applications with a dialogue box, or that need attention bounce. One of my icons shows me system stats (cpu, memory, disk, network activity, and cpu use over the last minute) in a cryptic, but readable fashion.

There is certainly a lot more that can be done to make icons more informative and useful, but to say that they have not advanced is to ignore all of the above. OS X has provided the means to make icons useful. Some developers have run with it and some have ignored the capabilities. There is more to be done, mostly with with more advanced file managers. Some will have to wait until there is more cpu power available and some can be done now. Just don't ignore the state of the art because you are not using it for whatever reason.

Re:Truth is Beauty

[Doc Ruby]

I ignored it because I was ignorant - thanks for the tip :). Is that icon state updated by the OS, or direct write by the app? Is the facility ready now for exposing (get/set) STDIN/OUT/ERR in the icon? Can a separate app read/write the icon state of another app? And could I write an app that lets me draw stretchy lines between icons, to indicate pipelines? If the hooks are there, maybe we won't have to wait too long.

Re:Truth is Beauty

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Is that icon state updated by the OS, or direct write by the app?

The icon is drawn by the OS in the Finder (file manager) and in the dock (err, running application manager and shortcuts to any specified files, application, directories, etc.) when the application is not running. It can be updated at any time by the application while it is running, but control reverts to the OS when the application closes. This is something that can be worked around, but I wish the dev tools would easily allow application icons to change to indicate the last state of that application. Right now applications can mostly send updates to the icon in the dock, not in the window manager (as far as I can tell). The window manager supports previews of a number of file types (similar to Windows XP, but with more file types supported) and displays progress bars for downloading files.

Is the facility ready now for exposing (get/set) STDIN/OUT/ERR in the icon? Can a separate app read/write the icon state of another app?

I'm no expert on this. I'm sure it is doable, but I'm not sure how easy it is. I suspect it is not quite there yet for practical purposes.

could I write an app that lets me draw stretchy lines between icons, to indicate pipelines? If the hooks are there, maybe we won't have to wait too long.

Sadly, I think you would need to write your own file manager for this (or modify one of the already written open source ones for OS X). It is certainly possible, but I have never looked into how hard it would be. OS X supports pipes of course, but I don't think the finder supports easily creating them and the finder is closed source. There is a GUI scripting application called "Automater," I think, due out next month with the OS X 10.4 that allows for this sort of thing, but I don't know how well it will be integrated with the file manager.

you will laugh, but

[dunkelfalke]

many of those windows animations, like for example this small animation when deleting files to the recycle bin, are avi files.

Re:you will laugh, but

[LiquidCoooled]

Phew!
for a minute there, I thought you were going to say "this small animation when your system crashes".

Re:you will laugh, but

[Anonymous Coward]

No wonder it always takes longer to load the animation than delete the file.

Application icons?

[haluness]

On a related note does anybody know where one could get good quality file type icons (PDF, Word etc). Browsing the Net I see websites that use these types of icons to indicate documents but I was wondering where they got them from.

Any points would be appreciated

Re:Application icons?

[godless dave]

They get them by browsing to web sites that use them, right-clicking the icons they want, and choosing "Save image as..."

Icons

[RagingChipmunk]

A neat step forward in Iconography for windows would be the ability to use alternate image formats. Time for the 'ICO' to go, yes, I know its a special format, multiple resolutions, color schemes yadda yadda.

Even though it begs for abuse, support for an animated GIF as your desktop icons could be fun.

Re:Icons

[SithLordOfLanc]

I seem to vaguely remember that some of the IBM Aptivas included animated icons on your desktop. I have no idea what format they were or how they worked. Anyone have any input on this?

Re:Icons

[Anonymous Coward]

God, no - this would NOT be a step forward! PLEEEEEEEEEEEZE don't do this!

That's no fun

[bstadil]

Taking down the site is part of the Esprit de Corp of being a slashdotter.

It instills a sense of empowerment and camaraderie among us, don't take this away from us ;-)

Re:That's no fun

[danalien]

... well, I can admit I felt the same way when I was a Teenager ... but whu't ya' know, time did beat some common sense into me, after all :-)

... sense will bite you, sooner or later. Young skywalker =)

Menus?

[Anonymous Coward]

On the screen there were lots and lots of cryptic icons, whose meanings I couldn't begin to understand. If they had been English words, I might have had a chance.

Has RMS ever heard of "menus"?

Hmmm, I want to Save my File to disk. Clearly, the large, glowing disk icon is too vague to understand, and I'm far too busy to investigate what the File -> Save option does...

Re:Menus?

[moonbender]

And typically the menus have the associated icon attached to the command, which helps learning the icons for future usage.

Re:Menus?

[arose]

Have you ever heard of Emacs?

He is obviously talking about the in-your-face expierence -- the menu bar is small compared to all the default toolbars in MS Word.

Re:Menus?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever heard of Emacs?

Indeed I have. They should include a text editor in that little OS.

the menu bar is small compared to all the default toolbars in MS Word.

I don't know what you did to your copy of Word, but my menu bar is perfectly clear and legible, sitting right atop my toolbars. By my eyes, it looks about 2-3 pixels smaller than the toolbar. If you can't see the File option, then you've seriously monkeyed-up your install.

Re:Menus?

[arose]

I haven't used Word in a long time, but I am talking about the first impression (it's full of icons) not menu bar visibility.

Re:Menus?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am talking about the first impression (it's full of icons) not menu bar visibility.

So you'd prefer that the toolbar be hidden by default? You do know that you can hide toolbars with a simple right-click, right? Now you've got your menus, and it's no longer "full of icons". Of course, your definition of "full" obviously means "two rows".

I bet if there were just menus, you'd be complaining that Word doesn't provide quick-and-easy icon-based access like OO.o or Abiword does.

Re:Menus?

[arose]

One toolbar with a few carefully selected icons sounds like a good default to me. I think abiword should get rid of the formating bar as it clutters the workspace and makes it easy to do "bad" formating. Also I seem to remember Word 97 having the "Graphics" toolbar by default at the bottom, but I could be mistaken.

Opinion on History of Icons

[Anonymous Coward]

:-)

My two dollars!

[blueZ3]

My two dollars!

Rude!

[EEPS]

ICONS??? I use the terminal you insensitive CLOD!

Re:Rude!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well... So do I...
...X-terminal...

excellent graphics... but in grayscale...

bah humbug

[Anonymous Coward]

Gateway Timeout
The following error occurred:
[code=GATEWAY_TIMEOUT] A gateway timeout occurred. The server is unreachable. Retry the request.

Artist (aka not me)

[LPetrazickis]

Weboso (aka Jairo Boudewyn) is the creative force behind those. DeviantArt has a sprawling interface, so here's a direct link to his Gallery.:)

Icons long before computers:Coptic,Armenian,Byzant

[Anonymous Coward]

Early church invented the icons long before computers: Coptic (Egyptian) icons, Armenian icons, Georgian, Nestorian, Byzantine (Greek, Slavic) icons, Maronite icons, Assirian (Iraki) icons, and last (but not least) Roman Catholic icons, where are they?. There were wars fought for and against icons, the Eastern and Western churches were separtared for 170 years because a difference of opinion about icons, etc. A history of icons MUST DEAL with all these issues.

My friend maht said it best...

[Anonymous Coward]

"the only place for icons is in a church, a burning church at that" -- maht

[posting anonymously because the general lack of sense of humour among /. moderators]

mirror here

[BibelBiber]

http://mirrordot.com/stories/8245c9dd88b5025e1c6ce 44f17fd4fb3/index.html here you go!

Re:mirror here link works now

[BibelBiber]

http://mirrordot.com/stories/8245c9dd88b5025e1c6ce 44f17fd4fb3/index.html sorry, forgot how to do that :-)

What? No Amiga?!

[AstroSurf]

Talk about icons! You could make full-screen icons on Ami! And the selected version could be a completely different picture from the unselected.

That said, it was mostly a low-overhead UI. Now sadly missed.

Re:What? No Amiga?!

[Brandybuck]

You could make full-screen icons on Ami!

But why would you want to? Seriously, my current desktop allows me to use icons in the sizes 16x16, 22x22, 32x32, 48x48, 64x64 and 128x128. Sure, the Amiga could use any arbitrary size, but why would I ever need a 21x21 or 66x66 icon? Those fixed sizes cover every case I need (desktop toolbar, taskbar, panel, zoom, etc). There's simply no pressing need for arbitrary icon sizes.

Re:What? No Amiga?!

[AstroSurf]

>>You could make full-screen icons on Ami!

>But why would you want to?

Didn't say I did. Didn't say I liked them. (I mostly didn't.)

>Sure, the Amiga could use any arbitrary size

And in that respect, I think it's unique and therefore merits a special place in the history.

A little credit to the inventor

[blamanj]

When the Xerox Star came out, it had icons because they had been proposed in a PhD thesis by David Smith.

It's as if icons STARTED 2-4 years ago...

[Beltway Prophet]

I have to disagree. The NeXT had amazing icons back in the late 80s and early 90s, many of which still hold up today (though they were only 2-bit black and white).

I really like having the side-by-side comparison of icons, but they've chosen mostly modern, mostly mainstream OSes. "Trash" icons in particular are a favorite of mine, but here they're all nearly identical (with the exception of OS/2's wacky shredder). It's also weird that they don't include the folder icon, one of those basics that some OSes did slightly differently (eg, the Amiga's "drawers").

They do show some Lisa icons here, but what about all the other early GUIs? It would be great to include DEC GEM, a sampling of X11 icons from different UNIXes, and geesh - the NeXT, which they claim to be represented by Rhapsody (it's not! Where are the Black Hole and Recycler?!?)

Plus, any history of the GUI that excludes Xerox is missing the prime mover! With a quick search I found this site which includes screenshots from the Xerox Star. The icons are distorted, being photos of a curved screen, but surely someone somewhere has the original bitmaps.

The "interactive chart" of GUI influences on this page shows dozens of sources I've never even heard of...I'd like to see a history that cites these designs, to show the initial struggle to represent all these machine functions graphically, not just the differences between popular, modern UIs, after everyone's adopted a common visual vocabulary for most things.

Re:It's as if icons STARTED 2-4 years ago...

[Anonymous Coward]

NeXTSTEP as also 32 bits icons. They were built with http://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/IconBuilder.jpg. They can also be animated in the Dock http://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/Fonctions_Noms.htm l#Icones.

The real inventor

[Anonymous Coward]

was an anonymous church (catacomb) painter around 50-100 AD, probably a slave (Christianyty started as a slave's religion, they craved for the illusion of the afterlife). Rich folks did not care for the illusion of the afterlife, for them life on Earth was Heaven and classical Roman religion was good enough (who could blame them, If I lived back then and I were rich I would have stayed a pagan or possibly a freethinker and would not adopt christianity either)

i did some math back in the day...

[option8]

[this was back before Mac OS 9, 1998ish, when mac icons were 32x32 @ 32 bits/pixel with 16x16 versions as well. i had just started creating my own custom icons, and was intrigued by the idea that i could potentially write a program to create every possible bitmap icon, but thought about where to store them.]

i thought i'd share with you folks the results of a few moments' inspiration, and several moments' calculation - hey it was a friday afternoon.

i was thinking today, with the number of icons i have stuffed away on my hard drive, just how many possible icons there could be, and, consequently, could i have them all (would i have room)?

so, i looked at 8 bit icons first. 8 bits means 7 bits (255 levels) of color and 1 bit (2 levels) for transparency. this isn't exacly how it works in icons, but it's close enough. so let's say 256 possible colors for each of 1024 (32 columns x 32 rows) pixels in a standard 8 bit, 32x32 icon.

though it's been a while since i did any permutation/combination, i think this means that an icon can take on any one of 256^1024 (256x256x256... 1024 times). and that's just the 8 bit, 32x32 variety. which, to answer my first question, is a very, very large number of possible icon combinations - the iconfactory will never go out of business. not in my lifetime, anyway.

so, would i be able to store them all?

considering each 8 bit icon takes on a 4 bit and 1 bit version, as well as a 1 bit mask, _and_ 16x16 (256 pixel) versions of same, each custom icon takes up 2240 bytes ((8 + 4 + 1 + 1 * 1024) + (8 + 4 + 1 + 1 * 256) bits) (resedit shows 2640 bytes, what's the other 400?). so, in one megabyte, i can theoretically store 3,177 uncompressed icons. on a one gig drive, that's about 3,253,763. compressed? ask aladdin.

unfortunately, i have no calculator that will tell me an actual numerical answer to 2240x(256^1024) but suffice it to say, it's quite a large number. much too large to be contained on any hard drive i own.

now, if you consider that macos 8.5 added a 32 bit icon to the mix (24 bits color + 8 bits tranparency) the number of possible icons jumps to a whopping 4,294,967,296^1024, and that multiplied by the additional 4k per icon.. well, i doubt even nasa has that kind of storage. well, maybe nasa.

- bored with a calculator on a friday afternoon -

MODS?!

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF? The Gimp does not support .ico without some serious patching. And even then the support sucks.

Can't we all just get along?

[game kid]

You and the parent are both right, believe it or not. Windows icons can either be in the completely different format described above, or made from a plain old BMP with (as parent stated) the first pixel being the desired transparency key. Confusing, but true. The GIMP makes the ICOs you refer to, while both Paint and GIMP can make the simpler "keyed" one as a BMP (you rename it after).

No, nevermind.

[game kid]

You are right, the keyed one doesn't exist. I fail it.

Re:No, nevermind.

[Random832]

you're not supposed to rename it - just go to "change icon" on the shortcut and select the bmp as filename

I gotta say my favorite group is, surprisingly ...

[Anonymous Coward]

RedHat's! Maybe my brain is able to process the images easier, or maybe it's the colors chosen, or maybe it's the nice looking ballpoint pen there on the notepad app ...

Wow! Mad props to RedHat!

Dave

SVG?

[tardigrades]

Why is no one mentioning kde and scalable vector graphics. That means any size. Also the crystal icon set blows everything else away as far as looks go.

Icon usage

[Anonymous Coward]

I see that there is alot of antigonism here to the overuse of icons in applications but icons serve a very important usage. Anyone who has worked on the interface side of things for global applications knows that localization of text is often a very difficult process. While the use of unicode has helped things out in recent years, as developers no longer have to support multiple encodings, some languages present some unique layout challenges. For instance, the german word for "Settings" is some 29 letters long! Keeping things like this in mind during interface layout is a nightmare.

A properly designed icon has universal recognition no matter the background of the user. It makes things easier on the localization team, easier on the developer, and ultimately gives a better experience to the user.

For icon design philosophy, it is interesting to read the icon design guidelines for
Apple's OS X Aqua interface
Microsoft Windows XP

Mirror

[tajmorton]

Thanks to Mirrordot.

Jimmac's GNOME icons

[Jim Hall]

If you like icons, you may also want to check out Jimmac's ikony. You've probably seen a lot of his icons already, if you use GNOME. Really great stuff!

I did some in 1998

[Anonymous Coward]

They were used in may programs at the time as toolbar icons... I still see them often.

They are on SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/icon-collection/

you can see many of them here http://www.trash.net/~ffischer/admin/icons/

Re:The more things change...

[Echnin]

Yeah, this is because when you open an app in OS X, its dock icon actually becomes a part of the open application's writable screen space. So they can do anything in that area that they can do in an application window. Which I think is nice.

png2ico supports multiple images

[krunk4ever]

i was going to post this too!

one cool thing about png2ico is it takes in multiple images and displays the best one. so i can put a 16x16, 32x32, 64x64, 128x128, etc and the program displaying the icon will automatically select the best size.

Amiga???

[Anonymous Coward]

It's one thing not to mention AmigaOS in an article about, say, server OS history (though the "Envoy" amiga proprietary network system for what would later come to be called "clusters" (we called 'em "farms") was vaguely interesting in its time).

But GUI Desktop Icon history???? Huh? Just totally leaving out the Amiga is INSANE.

OS versus Window Managers

[MavEtJu]

I wish that people who made these overviews understood the difference between the underlaying OS and the Window managers on top of it (I understand that for a lot of ms-windows people this is still a tricky concept).

RedHat Linux isn't a window manager, it is an operating system. GNOME is a window manager, KDE is a window manager and they have different icons. And there are more window managers, with and without icons on the desktop, than these two.

Re:OS versus Window Managers

[Anonymous Coward]

*whine* why do people not know every uninteresting bit about my linux distribution and talk about interesting things instead of nitpicking?

Re:OS versus Window Managers

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome is a desktop environment, Metacity or Fluxbox (my personal favourite) is a window manager.

Re:OS versus Window Managers

[nickos]

Woah, be careful there. You're right to point out that there's a difference between operating systems and window managers, but there's also a difference between desktop environments (like the (IMO) bloated KDE and GNOME) and window managers. Desktop environments consist of a seperate window manager (KDE uses KWin, while GNOME may use any NetWM compliant WM (the default is currently Metacity)), file manager and many other parts. It is usually the file manager that uses icons.

That explanation took longer than I thought...

Amiga Icon sets -proto themes

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the other points about Amiga icons apart from their animation and arbitrary size that several other posts have mentioned, was that people produced themed icon sets in the 80s and 90s, mainly because the default out-of-box theme was, uh, functional at best (it was designed to be clear on a crappy TV, though).

MagicWB was probably the most popular in the Amiga european heyday of the early 90s and widely imitated by third parties. Yeah, it looks kinda crappy now. But boy could it piss off a PC/AtariST/Mac owner back in the day (NeXT users presumably went "meh", not that cognitive dissonance would let them ever admit an amiga 1/10th the price of a NeXT box could hold a candle to their machines)

The later 90s NewIcons set was more about function than prettiness (they expanded icon images to a 256-color palette), but the "newicons style" (colorful isometric, think old KDE only drawn by artists with talent :-) ) had the most clearly distinguishable icons and wasn't bad looking anyway, and it was designed for long term use, not just initial wow factor. Countless icons were 2-style, with MagicWB native images and NewIcons style images embedded in the .info files (which stored icons for the associated applicats) where only OSes with newicons patches could see them.

NewIcons could still hold their own against some iconsets I see today, anyway, especially in the clarity stakes.

Exoticons were NewIcons popular with gamers for obvious reasons when you see the screenshot...

GlowIcons were a NewIcons set and characteristic style third-parties imitated that appeared in the sunset of Amiga era.

NewIcons and GlowIcons inspired clean, elegant default look of later niche-market AmigaOS releases in the zombie-living-death of Amiga era.

Re:They're too "static" [winhat]

[winhat]

Because i like to go to one central place for music, movie and tv-series downloads where i know the quality of the oak tree.

Time flies like a banana.

Major advancement...

[4_Minor_Drawbacks]

One of the greatest websites for mac icons has a fun history section. you all should check it out. [iconfactory.com]

Re:Amiga Icons from long time Amiga user

[amiga-x]

The other thing was that ordinary people could write icon programs and post them on aminet
I use a 3 button mouse I think icons are a relic...

Jobs quote about Microsoft

[BancBoy]

All I could think of is the Steve Jobs interview where he says that "the trouble with Microsoft is they (just) have no taste." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs

Re:Jobs quote about Microsoft

[grahamlee]

Ah yes, that was in Triumph of the nerds. I loved that show (and Glory of the Geeks/Nerds 2.0), but still haven't got around to reading Accidental Empires. Well, I did read a small section, in which we have a quote from Gates about Jobs - when NeXTSTEP was released, Gates was asked (I think by Cringely for InfoWorld, but that point isn't made clear) whether he would be developing for the new system. "Develop for it? I'll piss all over it!" Well, in terms of sales he did, but in terms of style? I don't think so.

Not as good as I expected

[ESqVIP]

I personally found the article quite lacking. There's no "directory" representation, something that appears in pretty much every graphical interface.

Not to mention they didn't consider the Win95 Plus! icons (they sucked, I never liked them, but anyway they're part of Windows' icon history).

Let's not even get into Internet Explorer being a synonym to "browser"... yeah, I found interesting to see how IE's icon changed across time (but I'm fairly sure there's a Win95 icon missing in there for IE1-IE3), but couldn't we have a specific "Internet Explorer" category? Same for e-mails: saying the Microsoft Exchange icon evolved into Outlook Express is quite dumb (btw, there's also an icon for OE missing, from the IE 4.0 times, I believe; when the Outlook Express counterpart of IE 4.01 launched they replaced the globe with the blue "e" that we see there)

What would you call it?

[1davo]

"Of course, they have the Lisa/Mac/OS X paths, but there's the Windows progressions, along with entries for NeXT, OS/2, BeOS, and yes, Linux. Would you call it progress?"

Nah, not really - while I love some of the eye candy themes out today, such as SVG based icons...

Sometimes I need a break from all that glitz so I just xinit -geom =100x20+100+100 so I can launch my openGL stuff without any WM candy.

Icons? yes thanks- I am an icon >;-)

Peace_out

It is a verry different thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Animated Icons on the Amiga meant that in your filemanager you clicked on a document or program and it presented a different Image than before. This was aestetically pleasing and gave you a better feedback than todays highlights, because the second Image could tell what happens (after you double clicked it) in a visual way.

This is verry different from the animations in Dock or Systray(TM).

Likewise the arbitrary size of Amiga icons was that a small program (Utility) could have a small icon and a big one that would take over your machine could have a huge icon, depicting a lot of detail. The maker of the Icon had the choice. Thats verry different from the scalable icons in todays OSses, where all icons can have multiple sizes as long as they are all the same size ;-)

Re:It is a verry different thing

[CableModemSniper]

Untrue. I am not sure about KDE but I KNOW that icons on the GNOME desktop can be different sizes from each other.

What do you mean you don't read Chinese?

[Anonymous Coward]

But what happens when you show that character to someone who isn't Chinese, Japanese, or possibly Korean (or other Chinese influenced cultures?)

An image of a floppy disc is far more interpretable across all cultures than a combination of a box, line, squigglydit and two hashmarks (or whatever character would represent "save file.")

...and at least one person will look at it and say, "hey, I got a tattoo like that!"

AssHat indeed

[setagllib]

(This is from someone with some boobie experience)

You're the idiot, and it's in not realising that while calling GNU/Linux just 'Linux' is just fine, calling KDE/GNOME/etc 'Linux' is idiocy. It runs just as well on any BSD, and other platforms too I've heard. Yet the same icons are still there, and are drawn the same. Therefore the icons have NOTHING to do with Linux, except that you can get them drawn on a Linux box. The same way, you can take the images and stick them on a Windows box, within resolution limits. Now, they we're MADE for the Windows system of course, they were for their desktop environment or window manager, but they weren't made for Linux either - for all you know it could have been made under a BSD.

I keep getting asked about my WindowMaker environment, "so is that Linux?", and I have to explain that, no it's not, it's WindowMaker in an XOrg server, but yes the kernel is Linux, not that it matters here since its effects on my graphical interface are completely trivial. Of course this is usually asked by the people who think that there are only three systems out there (MacOS, Windows, and Linux - and that all of them only run on x86 because there is no other architecture, and what's an architecture?), and so on.

But you're not much better. Classing OS-agnostic software like KDE or GNOME as Linux just because it happens to be MOST OFTEN USED in Linux, and saying that separating kernel from software is self masturbation and completely pointless, is idiocy of the highest order. Hell, the ICONS, which are completely untied to the kernel, definitely shouldn't be stuck with the OS title.

Re:AssHat indeed

[AssHatAnonymous]

Absolutely nowhere in my post did I refer to KDE or Gnome. I was referring to the pedantic losers who feel an uncontrollable urge to get oral giardia and start spewing "Linux is a kernel!" "Linux is a kernel!" anytime anyone actually users the phrase outside of that context. To the rest of the computing world, Linux is more than just a kernel.

Oh, and it's not GNU/Linux, it's just Linux. Get over it. Nobody who was involved in putting together the original linux distros ever looked at Dick Stallman's lunatic screed when assembling the components of their systems. They copied Unix, just like the big Dick did. Only they were smart enough not to have such a hard on for Lisp that they envisioned a world where you only needed a keyboard with two symbols, open- and close-parenthesis. Besides GNU isn't even a has been, it is a never was.

Finally I wasn't talking about your hairy man boobs. So in the future you might want to strike that qualifier of "some boobie experience".

"Develop for it? I'll piss all over it!"

[BancBoy]

True....to a point. Last time I checked, Microsoft's Mac Business unit is producing Office, Media Player as well as the acquired Virtual PC for, what can only be described as the current incarnation of NeXT...the OS I am booted into at the moment, Mac OS X. Funny, all these years later the game continues. TIme to dig out the .AVI of Revenge of The Nerds fo a chuckle.

Re:Amiga??? and then some . .

[vortexau]

Truely, and what other desktop could display
301 clocks with a 50Mhz speed cpu?