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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?"
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.
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
Mark
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.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
you can always use AmiWM, using my 1.x patch... http://www.cis.rit.edu/~jerry/Software/amiwm/ :)
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).
.bmp to .ico.
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
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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).
The Dogcow's name is Clarus, it simply makes the sound "Moof" :) It's a common misconception.
You can just use a .tif file and use interface builder to add it to your program.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
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.
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.
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.
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...
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
Try...
http://www.microangelo.us/
Then see my site iconsurf.com where hundreds of thousands of icons are displayed to help you surf the internet.
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.
I think that says it all.
What you want is Irfanview. Supports a shitload of formats, plugins, etc. It's lightweight. It saves .ico format. Irfanview is the shiz.
Do you love freedom??? Do you love freedom!!! DO YOU LOVE FREEDOM!!!!!!!!
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"?
/. replacing the Submit and Preview button text with little images. What would be the point?
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
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
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.
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.
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*) ...and if you got 'Konqueror' create a (new) shortcut (like so): :P) :P)
'Searh provider name' == 'Coral CDN' (or enter your own name
'Search URI' == 'http://redirect.nyud.net:8090/?url=\{@}'
'URI shortcuts' == 'cdn,mirror,mirr' (or, again, pick your own 'web shortcuts'
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.
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
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.
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. :)
'I don't want more choices. I just want better things.' - Edina Monsoon
many of those windows animations, like for example this small animation when deleting files to the recycle bin, are avi files.
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
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).
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Weboso (aka Jairo Boudewyn) is the creative force behind those. DeviantArt has a sprawling interface, so here's a direct link to his Gallery.:)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
try snico at http://www.snidesoft.com it is freeware
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
Morphing Software
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.
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.
Astro
When the Xerox Star came out, it had icons because they had been proposed in a PhD thesis by David Smith.
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.
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
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
RiscOS supported multiple sized icons up to 256 colours - in 1988.
-- Soruk
Thanks to Mirrordot.
Tell the truth and you won't have so much to remember.
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!
Windows was a BIG step backwards from Amiga
Brother, you couldn't have said it better:
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.
.ICO.
.ICO format was Very Very simple.
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
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
If they made a movie of your life, would anybody buy a ticket?