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[News] Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons SetANN.lu
Posted on 16-Feb-2004 22:40 GMT by Raffaele49 comments
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The new OS4.0 256 colors icon set by Martin "Mason" Merz in a screenshot of Hans-Joerg Frieden showing them all. And here is the discussion regarding the screenshots at amigaworld.net. I picked these news from amiganews.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 1 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 16-Feb-2004 22:01 GMT
And here the competition from Open Source. I don't think you notice a difference :)
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 2 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Raffaele on 16-Feb-2004 22:12 GMT
In reply to Comment 1 (Anonymous):
Mr. Anonymous wrote:

>And here the competition from Open Source.
>I don't think you notice a difference :)

Gah... Can you use as example another KDE set please?

Bleach!

This set of rubbersome hand-made-some icons gives me the creeps.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 3 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by takemehomegrandma on 16-Feb-2004 22:13 GMT
Looks quite nice IMO, although I think it has a certain "clip-art" feeling over it, but that's the way icons should be according to some tastes; plain and clear symbols. This should be quite familiar to "oldschool" Amigans. Perhaps a little overuse of gradients, but that's a bit of nitpicking. Looks nice!
:-)

I'm sure there will be third party patches which makes it possible use the many collections of 32-bit png icons later on.

(BTW, you wrote "screenshot of Hans-Joerg Frieden", where is he? ;-P )
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 4 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 16-Feb-2004 22:22 GMT
In reply to Comment 3 (takemehomegrandma):
>BTW, you wrote "screenshot of Hans-Joerg Frieden", where is he? ;-P

In the top right corner, posing as a drawer.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 5 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Lando on 16-Feb-2004 22:32 GMT
In reply to Comment 4 (Anonymous):
Looking good... has he lost weight?
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 6 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Raffaele on 16-Feb-2004 22:56 GMT
In reply to Comment 3 (takemehomegrandma):
Mr Takemehomegrandma wrote:

>BTW, you wrote "screenshot of Hans-Joerg Frieden", where is he? ;-P

Nice joke!

For the persons who are not introduced into English I could have written:

>"screenshot by Hans-Joerg Frieden"

To indicate he is the author.

But I intended

>"of property of"

And just because actually he not only owns that OS4 desktop...

...but also he is the unique person who could enjoy it... ;-P

Other betatester should wait that the entire icons set will be inserted into the download section of AOS 4.0 I think...
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 7 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Johan Rönnblom on 16-Feb-2004 22:58 GMT
I don't think either of these icon sets are very attractive.

Masonicons:
+ Clear symbols, you see what they are supposed to be.
- Ugly colours (the green, the blue, the yellow..), also it doesn't
match.
- Ugly borders (not so bad on a high-res CRT, but on my TFT.. eurgh).

KDE icons:
+ Good looking, good colours, a consistent style. Nice artwork.
- Bad as symbols, very hard to see what most icons are supposed to do.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 8 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by takemehomegrandma on 16-Feb-2004 23:06 GMT
In reply to Comment 6 (Raffaele):
Sorry for the joke! I'm not better myself, I do this all the time ...
:-)
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 9 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Joe "Floid" Kanowitz on 17-Feb-2004 05:33 GMT
In reply to Comment 7 (Johan Rönnblom):
> Masonicons:
> + Clear symbols, you see what they are supposed to be.
> - Ugly colours (the green, the blue, the yellow..), also it doesn't
> match.
> - Ugly borders (not so bad on a high-res CRT, but on my TFT.. eurgh).

Hm. I don't mind the colors; it's hard to tell if the jaggies are a regression or not.

But what I do notice is that this set is, overall, lower-contrast than the oldschool style lurking here, for instance. This could be some sort of issue of monitor gamma, but compare the HD icons, for instance... and wherever black is used in the new set... Hmm, there *is* a lot of detail there, but I had to crank the brightness on my CRT all the way up to notice.

So, er... gut reaction is that the lightening, combined with the loss of 'heavy' contrast on things like the screwdriver and monkey-wrench, makes it feel like squinting at everything in direct sunlight. Which I'm sure would be the intention, but... it's making me squint. ;) (Mostly on the green arrows, when they're overlaid on something with similar luminance - Overscan and Online.docky...)

...I'm going to guess the contrast and gamma are tuned for (and look better on) LCDs?
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 10 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Feb-2004 05:43 GMT
In reply to Comment 9 (Joe "Floid" Kanowitz):
...I'm going to guess the contrast and gamma are tuned for (and look better on) LCDs?

Nope :) Not on my LCD, anyway. I agree with you, the older screenshots had better icons. And the KDE icons... yuck! I can see what the poster wanted to say, but I think that particular iconset was a very poor example :)
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 11 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Raffaele on 17-Feb-2004 06:36 GMT
In reply to Comment 8 (takemehomegrandma):
Mr. Takemehomegrandma wrote:

>Sorry for the joke!
>I'm not better myself, I do this all the time ...
>:-)

:-)

Becoming serious again dear TMHG, I wonder a thing...


What could happen if some moron delete mistakenly the PNG icons (or whatever is their file-format)?

Does the OS4.0 replaces the icons deleted with other ones, generiques and system-based, built in into the OS Kickstart or Workbench Code, as other AmigaOS did since 2.0???

If they had forgotten this feature, then.... OMG!!! :-P
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 12 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Emeric SH on 17-Feb-2004 07:21 GMT
In reply to Comment 11 (Raffaele):
" What could happen if some moron delete mistakenly the PNG icons (or whatever is their file-format)?

Does the OS4.0 replaces the icons deleted with other ones, generiques and system-based, built in into the OS Kickstart or Workbench Code, as other AmigaOS did since 2.0???"

Unless I'm mistaken, there are no png icons in OS4 yet.

As to the new OS4 icons - there is an impression of lacking edges in most of them. Pretty disturbing, I liked older Mason Icons more. There are some resembling to the "old school", or are they just the same? They give a much better impression :)
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 13 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Emeric SH on 17-Feb-2004 07:25 GMT
However, I like the Grim Reaper icon, it's lovely :) But most of the rest gives the feeling of a much needed overhaul...
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 14 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Feb-2004 07:43 GMT
In reply to Comment 13 (Emeric SH):
Uuuups! I am blind! I am blind! Few icons look very good (USB, GrimReaper) but the rest is worse than OS3.9 iconset. Bright blue looks really really bad, datatypes icons (red, green, orange wooooosh) no comment. Hyperion should hire and PAY somebody make real icon set...

I though Hyperion are working towards moddern OS, but this screenshot looks like 16bit retro nightmare....
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 15 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Kendrel on 17-Feb-2004 07:46 GMT
Kinda weird: it's look like some icons have only a few colors (trashcan with only one yellow and one orange for the gradient) when others (mostly the "new one", like the usb icons) have a pretty good gradient in all shade of grey and black)

Does Mason finish this set yet?
I've got the impression he draw wonderful NEW icons (usb, grim reaper, amiga input or the ones the new intuition window) but the olds icons are not modified yet...


Oh, and another thing! I see they're still the Tool and the Utility drawer so... What's the difference? :)
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 16 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by brotheris on 17-Feb-2004 08:07 GMT
With antialiasing against background they would look a lot better.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 17 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Don Cox on 17-Feb-2004 09:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 16 (brotheris):
"With antialiasing against background they would look a lot better."

8-bit antialiasing is supposed to be coming for AOS 4.1 IIRC, so the jaggies will presumably fade out some time next year.

I think this new icon set is very good. The PNG set linked to above is truly repulsive, IMO. It is all a matter of taste, and there will surely be lots of PNG icon sets ported to AOS4. It only needs a simple conversion utility.

I like Mason's colour schemes and general style, but I don't expect everyone to agree.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 18 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by brotheris on 17-Feb-2004 09:44 GMT
In reply to Comment 17 (Don Cox):
there will surely be lots of PNG icon sets ported to AOS4. It only needs a simple conversion utility

But why not use real thing ? It is not bad to admit beeing second and take good example from others.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 19 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Feb-2004 09:49 GMT
Yuck! It is evident that Mason does not master the
new 256 colors he has at his disposal. The old
32 color icons were true masterpieces of art, but
this...? I hope his updated GI will still be included
in the contributions drawer, so I can replace those
new 256 colored ones...
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 20 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Feb-2004 09:54 GMT
In reply to Comment 14 (Anonymous):
>Uuuups! I am blind! I am blind! Few icons look very good (USB, GrimReaper) but >the rest is worse than OS3.9 iconset. Bright blue looks really really bad, >datatypes icons (red, green, orange wooooosh) no comment. Hyperion should hire >and PAY somebody make real icon set...
>

I agree! It just looks hideous! :-(

>I though Hyperion are working towards moddern OS, but this screenshot looks >like 16bit retro nightmare....

Spot on!
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 21 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Amon_Re on 17-Feb-2004 10:21 GMT
Lots of anonymous cowards posting crap again?
What's it with you people & icons? It's not like you can't replace them with something you like & all.

Besides, they get the job done, it's clear what they do by looking at them.

Cheers
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 22 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Trizt on 17-Feb-2004 10:21 GMT
Gosh, IMHO the gloveicons from 3.5/3.9 looked a lot better than OS4 icons, are you sure they are 256 color icons or that the totla amount of colors used for all the icons?

IMHO there aren't any nice icons around at the moment, most seem to be quite ugly and ripoffs of OSX icons or so.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 23 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Feb-2004 10:24 GMT
In reply to Comment 1 (Anonymous):
Well some of the PNG icons are good, but as that screenshot shows some of the PNG icons are really ugly too. That screenshot has some icons which I would never use. One big problem with the PNG icos is that many of them look good only if you use HUGE icons. If you want to us smaller versions then they loose quality and don't look as good anymore.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 24 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Don Cox on 17-Feb-2004 11:08 GMT
In reply to Comment 18 (brotheris):
"there will surely be lots of PNG icon sets ported to AOS4. It only needs a simple conversion utility

But why not use real thing ?"

Because Workbench hasn't been rewritten to be fully 24-bit yet, unlike the WB clone in MorphOS.

Personally, I haven't seen a PNG set that I like yet. But opinions differ.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 25 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Feb-2004 11:55 GMT
In reply to Comment 23 (Anonymous):
>If you want to us smaller versions then they loose quality and don't look as good anymore.

Nonsense. Anti-aliased 32 bit PNG icons tend to scale *very* well (not to mention that most icon sets come in different sizes). Personally, I wouldn't go below 48x48. For my taste, the AmigaOS icons are way too small. They originate in 14" CRT times and apparenty nobody has thought of taking into account that most people today use 19" CRT, 20" or 21" (or 15/17/18" TFT which are equivalent to 17/29/20" CRT).
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 26 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Feb-2004 12:12 GMT
IMHO these icons really sucks compared to PNG one (MorphOS or KDE).

Bye
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 27 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Trizt on 17-Feb-2004 13:56 GMT
IMHO we need a joint project to make nice looking icons for AmigaOS4/MorphOS that isn't copies of icons for Linux or any other OS.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 28 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by oGALAXYo on 17-Feb-2004 13:59 GMT
I made a comment on OSNews.com where this Icons stuff came up. You can read this by clicking on this Link.

greetings,

oGALAXYo
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 29 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Emeric SH on 17-Feb-2004 13:59 GMT
In reply to Comment 23 (Anonymous):
"One big problem with the PNG icos is that many of them look good only if you use HUGE icons. If you want to us smaller versions then they loose quality and don't look as good anymore."

Hm. In MorphOS you can change/limit icon sizes throughout the system from the prefs with just one click. In OS4 you will be stuck with what you get, and cannot resize them - so what was your point exactly with "smaller versions"?
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 30 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Feb-2004 14:27 GMT
In reply to Comment 29 (Emeric SH):
You did not understand what I sayd. PNG is as much a bitmap as IFF, Tt's not vectorgfx or something. Many of those PNG icons seem to be designed so that you should use those huge versions. Smaller versions just don't look as good usually. And if you mean that you can scale bitmap, then you again loose quality.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 31 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Feb-2004 14:28 GMT
In reply to Comment 29 (Emeric SH):
Ofcource PNG is not palette based, but you sure understand what i mean.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 32 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Feb-2004 14:33 GMT
In reply to Comment 25 (Anonymous):
Yes many icons sets come with many sizes, but many icon sets do have smaller zise icons which don't look good I think. Smaller icons just do not always look as good. I have seen lot's of icons which looked nice as a big icon, but same icon in smaller size was not so nice. I don't know if guys didn't bother to make those small versions as well or something.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 33 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Feb-2004 14:37 GMT
In reply to Comment 25 (Anonymous):
Not all of us have enough money to have 19"+CRT or 17"+ TFT. It seems that many of those who have amde PNG icons have not thought that people use smaller monitors too. You don't want to use huge 64x64 icons on 15" TFT those are much too big. And many of the smaller do not look so good.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 34 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Feb-2004 15:25 GMT
In reply to Comment 30 (Anonymous):
>And if you mean that you can scale bitmap, then you again loose quality

Not necessarily, it depends on the quality of the original image. If you have a 64x64 pixel antialiased 32 bit icon, it will scale down to virtually any size (even down to 16x16) in good quality. I goes without saying that you should only scale down, never up. I don't think that using a vector format would give better results for downsizing. It's quite likely that a hand-optimized/antialiased 64x64 pixel image will scale down a lot better than a vector image.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 35 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Don Cox on 17-Feb-2004 15:49 GMT
In reply to Comment 32 (Anonymous):
"Smaller icons just do not always look as good. I have seen lot's of icons which looked nice as a big icon, but same icon in smaller size was not so nice. I don't know if guys didn't bother to make those small versions as well or something."

Surely the smaller the icon image, the harder it is to design? You have to include enough information to make it immediately recognisable, and that is pretty difficult in 16x16 if you also want a style.

Think of recognising faces in a photo of a crowd.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 36 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Alkis Tsapanidis on 17-Feb-2004 19:43 GMT
In reply to Comment 11 (Raffaele):
Luckilly, they are .info files in MorphOS. That's how it should be really,
if they are .png in linux this accident can happen quite easily.
BTW, I really believe that the next step in OS4's GUI development would be
32bit icons, hopefully in PNG or some vector format. Having exchangable
icons between MorphOS, OS4 and Linux would be quite cool!
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 37 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Johan Rönnblom on 17-Feb-2004 21:55 GMT
If you're making *really* small icons, scaling them down is not going
to look too pretty. The "micro" setting in MorphOS seems to give 16x16
sized icons, imo they are under the limit. But they are also really
tiny! I think that even if you have a small and cheap monitor, you'd
want to use at least 24x24 which is the next step up in MorphOS.. and
which looks quite ok to me.

Compare with eg vector fonts, for really small sizes bitmap fonts will
look better. Although I made my own ttf font especially to work at
small sizes, which looks good at 10 points and upwards.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 38 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Ole-Egil on 18-Feb-2004 09:12 GMT
In reply to Comment 35 (Don Cox):
But there's a difference between designing for small size and scaling down from larger size. A good algorithm that knows WHAT information is necessary and what is just there to make the image look prettier is at present known as "graphical artist", therefore I agree with the idea that an icon designed for 16x16 will typically look "better" than one designed for 64x64 and scaled down.

You are of course entitled to your own opinion, and the definition of "better" is not a constant. I use it in the meaning "more recognisable to the user for what it does when clicked on and more like the graphical artist envisioned it" :-)

Btw, I meet this every day at work, as I maintain an embedded webserver with a graphical interface. Icons are hard to do, but tend to look better when bitmapped in right size to begin with, or at least designed within 2-3 times the resolution they are used in. If you go above that, scaling down leads to terrible artifacts and blurriness. So I have just silently dropped all the downscaled icons from previous versions and am using bitmap techniques on the excact resolution. Takes longer time to draw, but it does look better imho :-)
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 39 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Joe "Floid" Kanowitz on 18-Feb-2004 11:07 GMT
In reply to Comment 38 (Ole-Egil):
But there's a difference between designing for small size and scaling down from larger size. A good algorithm that knows WHAT information is necessary and what is just there to make the image look prettier is at present known as "graphical artist", therefore I agree with the idea that an icon designed for 16x16 will typically look "better" than one designed for 64x64 and scaled down.

Tangential to this note... There's been some debate over the inscrutability of the Prefs 'sliders' versus the old '?'s. Personally, I always thought the white-?-on-black-ovoid was part of the "Amiga flavor," and something that'd scale well to even the current graphics (versus even the attempt to mimic the Microsoft style in the 3.9 Glowicons?), but in any case...

The interesting thing about that aspect of the graphical design is that it's an attempt to portray metadata; the "?" signals a Prefs panel... Though the Amiga hasn't bothered having code behind that, because Prefs panels are basically just programs, not particularly 'special' like Control Panels on the Mac (which, in turn, never bothered finding a way to signal an icon-object is indeed a control panel; that was left to the icon designer, or the developer's choice of name for the file)...

Meanwhile, Microsoft ran with the CBM style, and actually figured out how to overlay the meta-imagery to icons - the little arrow on a shortcut being a prime example.

Since we have "prior art" on the whole 'look and feel' of that concept, it'd be nice to see that find its way into any rewrite of Workbench, extending to the obvious of allowing for tagging by detected filetype and so forth. (Of course, with an option to turn that on or off, or to continue using icons that themselves portray the difference, as we do now.) Done right, the 'tags' could then have prefs of their own, so you could embed text, or a mini-icon of a slider, or whatever the heck else you'd want, and put a gradient on the ovoid or leave it flat, and so on.

I wouldn't even consider this the realm of usability, since icons aren't particularly usable ;), but it'd get some of "our way of doing things" back into the "branding" of the GUI, which everyone now wants to pretend is indistinguishable from Luna. (Personally, I think it's started to look like a hybrid of Be and OS/2, which is fine by me, especially since many thought both of those looked or felt rather "Amigan." ;))

Btw, I meet this every day at work, as I maintain an embedded webserver with a graphical interface. Icons are hard to do, but tend to look better when bitmapped in right size to begin with, or at least designed within 2-3 times the resolution they are used in. If you go above that, scaling down leads to terrible artifacts and blurriness.Well, what we need is SVG everywhere and the extra 10GHz of CPU to pull it off, right? ;) (If anyone wanted to go nuts, scaling SVGs to bitmaps and caching them somewhere seems appropriate, since you generally only change desktop 'size' once. SVG data is itself pretty bloaty though, isn't it?)
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 40 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by spot on 18-Feb-2004 12:50 GMT
Hmmm.. :( this iconset was a big dissapointment, sadly. Masons older stuff is
better. Rendered icons would be cool. In general the MOS icons looks a whole lot better and that is not because of the amount of colours...
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 41 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Don Cox on 18-Feb-2004 14:11 GMT
In reply to Comment 39 (Joe "Floid" Kanowitz):
"(If anyone wanted to go nuts, scaling SVGs to bitmaps and caching them somewhere seems appropriate, since you generally only change desktop 'size' once. SVG data is itself pretty bloaty though, isn't it?)"

Distributing as vectors and rendering to scale as needed ought to work, but even then a part of an icon that is visible on the big size might vanish in the small size. Ideally, they are designed and painted for the final size.

The same thing applies to type face design. A smaller size of a face should not be just scaled down from a big size - the proportions often need to be changed to keep the readability and the look.

SVG is a "big" format compared to EPS or Illustrator88, but being text it would compress well.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 42 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 18-Feb-2004 16:21 GMT
In reply to Comment 41 (Don Cox):
>Ideally, they are designed and painted for the final size

Yes, an icon format should be used that has as least the option to have alternative sizes in it (such as the 16x16 icons often used in listviews). Does the png format support multiple images like gif?
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 43 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Kjetil on 19-Feb-2004 12:18 GMT
The AmigaInfo file-format is outdated, in many aspects, it uses planar format, the image date is restricted to 255 colours, and there is no storage area for 256 palette whit inn the file format is self, new Icons replaced the old magic icons (8 colours), by storing image date in the comment area in the icon as text, misusing the icon format, that area are often used preferences or as an configuration file area, so NewIcons breaks whit old format,

There conclusion is that Amiga Info file format need to be updated,
The header of icon is different sized depending on the icon type, one way update the icon format, can be done by creating new icon types so workbench can easily figure out how to display the icon, one way of improving the info file format can be bundle other format whit inn the info file it self, and use data types / mime to display them on screen.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 44 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Graham_nli on 19-Feb-2004 14:20 GMT
As per my comment on amigaworld, i don't like them. Not enough contrast, and they need an edge, maybe a 2 pixel black outline.

They are worse than the 32-colour GlowIcons!

Now hopefully the AmigaOS Icon system will be reworked in the future (with the Workbench rewrite) so be more flexible.

The .info system is good, so keep that. Instead of an icon image, have named blocks of data that use datatypes, so you can use .gif animations, .png for beauty, .svg for scalability, etc. You can keep the metadata in the .info file as well.

Why named blocks of data? So you can have multiple icons in the .info file, e.g., STANDARD, SELECTED (single click), SMALL, LARGE and all that. Small Icons for listviews. Other examples could be DRAGGED, CLICKED (dbl click, i.e., opened) ...

Why datatypes? for flexibility and future expansion. If not, just use PNG as it is a good solid image format.

Still, AmigaOS4 has some of the nicest window borders in a GUI I've ever seen. So that is good.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 45 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by kalmar on 19-Feb-2004 18:18 GMT
Yech. Too big, too orange-and-blue, just don't like 'em. The enormous window borders struck me as looking clunky as well. Nice try, and I know you can't please all the people all the time, but if I ever end up buying OS4, I'd want to replace them with something nice, like MagicWB icons.

And they're meant to be ICONS, not photo-realistic renderings!
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 46 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by kalmar on 19-Feb-2004 18:19 GMT
And I don't get all this talk about PNG? What does that have to do with the artistic design of the icons?
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 47 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Trizt on 19-Feb-2004 18:54 GMT
In reply to Comment 46 (kalmar):
nothing else than that you can use more colors than in classic icons, which can make the icon to look better in some cases.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 48 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Alkis Tsapanidis on 19-Feb-2004 20:37 GMT
In reply to Comment 47 (Trizt):
And you also have the alpha channel.
Screenshot of OS4.0 256 Colors Icons Set : Comment 49 of 49ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 20-Feb-2004 08:59 GMT
In reply to Comment 47 (Trizt):
And you will find it easier to install (png-)icons released for Linux and MorphOS.
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