Re: User interface suggestions

[thristian atdot org]

On Sat, Dec 02, 2000 at 06:53:18PM +0100, Guillermo S. Romero / Familia Romero wrote:
> thristian atdot org (2000-12-02 at 1234.16 +1100):
> > the most part, just uses .png files. It would be nice if some gallant
> > soul were to invent a nice new icon format for GNOME, preferably by
> > bundling .png files in an automated fashion, and hacking support for
> > it into GNOME.. 
> 
> Tar. You do not need to invent anything if you can, just reuse. Like
> Gimp using gzip or bzip2 to compress its own file format (foo.xcf.bz2)
> or Sawfish using tar and gzip for themes (foo.tar.gz). It could be
> easily understable, both by software and by people, and you do not
> need to compress (recompress PNGs? really a difference?).

OK, raw tar files.. PNGs are already gzipped internally.

> I would only name it specially, foo.iconpack.tar or foo-iconpack.tar
> so you know what it is, but not foo.iconpack, I do not want another
> ".ethemes are .tgz" talk with users if avoidable... and that way
> people will see icons are not magic, they already think too much about
> magic & computers.

Well, you'd also need a standard for finding an appropriate image
inside the iconpack... standard filenames, like
<width>x<height>x<bitdepth>.png, maybe even add alpha-bitdepth as
well. The problem with naming the files with a regular extension is
that the people come along, extract them, then try and figure out what
to do with the resulting shrapnel. The usual method of making
user-opaque packaging is to make an un-compressed .zip file - I'm
thinking WinAmp skin files, WinImage compressed images, Java .jar
packages, Mozilla .xpi files.. 

Another thing that occurs to me is that KDE might already be dealing
with this sort of thing, and if they've got a standard, it wouldn't be
a bad idea to copy them..

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