Re: Icons of program

[Dwight Hubbard <dlhubbar collins rockwell com>]

raster@redhat.com wrote:

> [snip]

> well the amiga version wroked pretty damn well and to date i havent
> seen a better system - and systems suggested here, form what i can see
> and my experience with gui systems for the past 10 years is that the
> amiga has the right concept (if we discount the macs special fs for
> holdinding icons) .. some details (like icons were planar etc.) were
> due to their being designed aroudn the hware they were on and the icon
> palette was fixed wiht newicons to replace the old icon library.. but
> all in all it was a very nice, compact usableand maintainable system
> that worked well and cohesively.
>

Exactly, of all the proposals that have been made the .info file concept has been
implemented and shown to work.  Windows 95 shows that centralizing things isn't as
reliable.   Besides which, how do you keep a centralized database synced up if the user
can do things directly to the filesystem from the command line.

Wouldn't it be better to make the icon handling into two libraries.  One library to
handle multiple data types in a standardized format, I.E. IFF library and keep the image
handling in imagelib.  That way, programs could use the IFF library or equivilent for
saving files which contain multiple types of data in a standardized format in addition
to using it to create or read .info files.

> ->  - use more inodes (one for meta-data file, several for the images [active
> ->    inactive, etc.])(But we've got these to spare, right?)
>
> yeah.. but they arent packaged together.. iyou have to thne keep track
> of ALL that data when moving it form one system to another etc... its
> much easier to have it packed up into a single file to move with the
> file that cion represents.. you cna make that icon be used by a new
> file by simply renaming the icon file.. :)
>
> ->  + It's simpler than implementing a new icon format. (KISSes better :-)
>
> nah.. same amount of work.. i'd still have to write routines to handle
> reading int he format and changing it and writign it out.. tis about
> the same amount of work. Trust me on this. I've done this several times
> already. :) I've learnt form experience. :)