Re: Icons of program

[Christian Scholz <ruebe aachen heimat de>]

Hi!

> ->   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.
> 
> yes.. that was a problem.. it coudl be easily fixed by having icons
> 24bpp :) create a new format. info was good for amigas.. but not for
> gnome. it's a good concept tho whcih shoudl at least be considered when
> coming up with a new format.

Maybe we can directly also use the idea of Datatypes from the Amiga.
This worked the following way: For each media type (gif, jpeg, aiff, wav)
you have a class in a special system directory. This class knows about
the type especially how to decode/encode the format. If an application
then wants to view an image it just asks the datatype.library if this
format is known and the library asks the datatypes. If one says yes,
this one is used to decode the image and to display it.
If we would have such a thing a program like the gimp would not need
all the plugins for loading images it just would use the datatypes
(and other programs would not need to code that stuff again).

And to come back to the icons: We wouldn't have to bother about the
format we just could use any format :)

A little note about the icon format: We maybe should make a tag-style
dataformat so that we can easily extend it whenever we need to. 

And another note: The problem with extra icon files might be
that a cp will not be aware of an icon (and thus wouldn't copy
it if you only specify the filename of the program). So there
might be also a special cp which is aware of this and copies it
accordingly (maybe controlled by a command line flag).


best,
  Christian

PS: When thinking back working with the amiga I wonder what this
    OS was able to do (if I compare it with the OS I use today,
    at least when you look at GUI aspects..) Unfortunately the
    source was not free ;-)