Re: Icons of program

[Peter Bortas <peter idonex se>]

Anders Wegge Jakobsen <wegge@wegge.dk> writes:

> Dwight Hubbard <dlhubbar@collins.rockwell.com> writes:
> > I was thinking the same thing yesterday.  It's simple to implement
> > and the Amiga showed that the concept worked fairly well.  What
> > would be nice would be to use the same format as the Amiga since
> > that would provide us with a large working set of freely available
> > icons to work with.
> 
>  I'd give that idea a bit of thought, before following it. The concept
> is sound in itself, but the implementation lacks in several
> places. The biggest flaw is the non-existant handling of different
> palettes and/or color depths of the icons. Furthermore, the
> manipulation of such images would require a specialized tool.
> 
>  It would probably be better to provide a tool to convert from .info
> to xpm or somesuch, and base further work on that.

Different color depths has always been supported in icon.library, the
problem was the palette. Fortunately it's all handled by functions so
that the newicon package could fix that a few years ago.

Not that any of the Amigas shortcomings would hinder us in any
way. Just learn from it and device something better. If we add a few
functions to gnomelib there's no problem in supporting all common
icon formats. The question is, what should be stored in these
icon-files? Filetypes and comments might be useful. Tooltypes was
convenient on the Amiga, but really used as preference-files for the
people to lazy to make a preference editor.

-- 
Peter Bortas                   http://peter.bortas.org
Idonex AB                      http://www.idonex.com