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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?"
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
moof the dogcow!
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.
Implicit Evaluation with PHP
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.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
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.
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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.
Why not fork?
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.