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A History of Icons
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Tue Mar 22, 2005 12:02 PM
from the you-mean-like-marilyn-monroe dept.
from the you-mean-like-marilyn-monroe dept.
John H. Doe writes "The GUIdebook has a great page illustrating the history of icons. Of course, they have the Lisa/Mac/OS X paths, but there's the Windows progressions, along with entries for NeXT, OS/2, BeOS, and yes, Linux. Would you call it progress?"
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Rolling your own (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to have some beauties on my Amiga, and they could be any size I liked, up to the whole screen if that was your wish. IIRC they were easy to draw with something that came with the operating system.
I'd like to take some of my raytracings and make them icons. Any ideas where to start?
Darn my dyslexia. At first glance I thought it said "A History of Loons" and thought it was something biographical about slashdot.
Re:Rolling your own (Score:5, Informative)
That's because the Windows .ico format is a complex meta-format with the capacity for multiple icon sizes and color depths. Paint Is just a rudimentary application like notepad and has never been the target of much improvement by MS.
The best Windows tool for editing icons is Microangelo. There is a shareware trial version available.
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Re:Rolling your own (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Rolling your own (Score:4, Funny)
It shows the firefox shagging an IE icon instead of the world. :)
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Re:Rolling your own (Score:5, Interesting)
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Artist (aka not me) (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Rolling your own (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Rolling your own (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Rolling your own (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Rolling your own (Score:5, Informative)
I think that says it all.
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Re:Rolling your own (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Rolling your own (Score:5, Informative)
It turns out that Windows can read BMPs as ICOs. Just make a BMP of the right size (16x16, 32x32, or 64x64) and rename the extension from
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As for my most used icons: Giving all my hard disks a icon with the drive letter on it. Makes using a tool bar (I have a "goto" toolbar that links to every drive and a few important folders) easy to locate which drive is which (I only have 6 partitions/hard drives on my windows box).
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Re:Rolling your own (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Rolling your own (Score:5, Interesting)
There was a Slashdot article posted some time ago where Steve Jobs was quoted as saying (way back when, and I paraphrase) that Bill Gates never understood the concept of design.
Despite the overhaul made for the XP interface, much of the same crap found on NT, 2K, etc. can be found on XP, and the inconsistencies aren't limited to icon choices.
As for the icon editor recommendation, unless it's capable of replacing the icons buried in innumerable
But that's just an opinion. I have otheres, of course.
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Re:Rolling your own (Score:5, Informative)
I design the icons in .png then convert them to .ico with png2ico [winterdrache.de]
works both on *nix and windows. You can also add several different image sizes in the icon file you make with this program.
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Re:Rolling your own (Score:3, Informative)
Website: http://www.mindworkshop.com/ [mindworkshop.com]
Price: $44.95
I also have the GIF Construction Set, which is great and all, but I'm just as likely to use some of my other graphics tools to create GIFs, or just
Re:Rolling your own (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.microangelo.us/
Re:Rolling your own (Score:3, Insightful)
Was this a *good* thing? IIRC, Amiga programs came with lots of oddly-shaped icons that frequently *were* a large portion of the screen-size.
I'm sure it's nice for the designer's ego, but massive icons aren't that great from a usability point-of-view.
Re:Rolling your own (Score:5, Funny)
Well, when you consider all of the things that icons do, they certain are worth the money you spend on the icon editor.
Have you ever clicked on an icon? You click on an icon and, bammo, there's a big spread sheet or email program on your screen or something. Icon editors must be complex and expensive to accomplish that. Seeing all of the amazing things icons do, it is the one software expense that the guys in purchasing will have no problem approving.
On an unrelated note, being a manager of a large software development team, I had been wondering why you techies like Dilbert so much. I have a big informative staff meeting. Afterwards, the techies gather around to pick the Dilbert that matches the meeting. I don't get it.
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Re:Rolling your own (Score:4, Informative)
Thats not true. ICO files have 2 channels per image (an XOR mask and an AND mask) plus other data different from BMP, such as the number of sizes and colors in the
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Deja Vu (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Re:Deja Vu (Score:3, Informative)
Orthodoxy Sunday (Score:5, Interesting)
The dominant theme of this Sunday since 843 has been that of the victory of the icons. In that year the iconoclastic controversy, which had raged on and off since 726, was finally laid to rest, and icons and their veneration were restored on the first Sunday in Lent. Ever since, that Sunday been commemorated as the "triumph of Orthodoxy."
Orthodox teaching about icons was defined at the Seventh Ecumenical Council of 787, which brought to an end the first phase of the attempt to suppress icons. That teaching was finally re-established in 843, and it is embodied in the texts sung on this Sunday.
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Amiga Icons (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Amiga Icons (Score:5, Interesting)
- Arbitrary size
- Could change image when clicked
- Possible arbitrary placement
This was making for some interesting applications. Like, the game Heimdall had screen high and half-screen wide icon of the character with a warhammer, when clicked the character was slamming the hammer down. I would add a tiny, 5x5px icon placing it over corner of Filemaster 2.2 icon just to launch Filemaster 2.0 in case it was needed (just like small "arrow down" in corner of "back" of Firefox)
There were tools converting pictures to icons. You could tile icons being parts of bigger image over some area, making a "clickable image". Clicking on directory ("drawer") icon was "opening the drawer", there were also many other cool "mini-anims" like hydraulic press "compressing" the package for a compressor program, a floppy multiplying itself for file copy etc.
Windows was a BIG step backwards from Amiga icon functionality. That step was never undone. Now all leading OSes have single-image, fixed-size icons.
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History of Icons? (Score:5, Funny)
Slooooooow Server... (Score:5, Funny)
my favorite icon (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:my favorite icon (Score:5, Informative)
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Icons? (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdotted to hell.
Full article text! (Score:5, Funny)
progress? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:progress? (Score:3, Insightful)
And I will say that the Slashdot habit of blaming everything you don't like on Microsoft is also not progress.
Funny how in one article everyone's like "Apple is teh cool, they invented EVERYTHING and Microsoft just copied them", and then as soon as someone percieves something Apple popularised - like using icons for everything and deprecating the command line - as "bad", they blame Microsoft for it!
Apple ar
Re:progress? (Score:4, Insightful)
Some things simply cannot be conveyed via a 12x12 or 16x16 (or whatever the res is) pictogram.
Tell that to the Chinese.
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Re:progress? (Score:4, Informative)
There are six commands in that table that they icon-ified. They saved maybe a few pixels of horizontal space, but I don't think they were hurting for room anyways. And it's a big step backwards in terms of usability and intuitiveness.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So isn't it overkill to use an image to replace one single word? How is that supposed to make things any easier?
It'd be like
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They're too "static" (Score:5, Funny)
The more things change... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago (Score:5, Interesting)
There are many more examples in the 2k->xp comparison. The address book, for instance. What was once clearly an Address book is now just an open book. The control panel, while not exactly clear in 2k, is now a Todo list! The desktop icon went from a desk with a letter in draft to a _vertical_ oriented surface.
Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago (Score:4, Insightful)
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I used a word processor once. Basically I was at a hotel, and I had to type something and get it out, so I used a computer there. And it was running some word processor, which might have been Microsoft Word, I don't know. On the screen there were lots and lots of cryptic icons, whose meanings I couldn't begin to understand. If they had been English words, I might have had a chance.
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Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago (Score:5, Insightful)
NO SHIT! Clicking a picture of a disk to save is a lot more intuitive than typing control-x, control-s. And if you can't figure out that the disk is for saving, you might think... hey, "file" might do things with my file, I'll click that, and hey look here it says "save", I wonder if that saves things
Hell, I even like emacs, but Stallman criticizing user interfaces is like Carrot Top criticizing fine theater.
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Susan Kare - Icon Artist (Score:5, Informative)
Coral links (Score:5, Insightful)
How hard is it to use coral links? Editors - why aren't you automatically append ".nyud.net:8090" to any url? How hard is that, really?.
Sigh...
Re:Coral links (Score:4, Interesting)
It's like a restaurant. You're stuck with the menu the restaurant has. Now, it's not that you can't necessarily get the kitchen to do a ham and cheese, but you have to do it in terms it understands (for example, you can order a burger that has ham and cheese, and order it without the beefburger, salad, etc), kind of like h[tt]p:, which runs on port 80. You can do it via the firewall, but it has to look like an HTTP request, which means running it on port 80. You can then say "Ohh, it's not really a burger, it's a ham and cheese sandwich" but as far as the kitchen's concerned, it's just one of their regular burgers. You might look at port 8090 as the ham - they're likely to have cheese burgers, but a ham, cheese, and beef burger? Not likely. So you can't have your ham and cheese because you haven't come up with a sandwich that really works within the framework you're given.
The only option is to leave the restaurant, and cook your own sandwich, but that's not always an option, especially if you actually work at the restaurant so can't leave until 5pm, but you're a waiter or you work at the bar or you greet people or wash up or something so you can't actually make the sandwich yourself (well, not in a unionized restaurant anyway. A union-free restaurant might allow it, but you don't want to upset the staff, and it's probably going against company policy.)
Port 8090 isn't supported by most corporate firewalls, so making all URLs point at it would just prevent Slashdot's working readers (the vast majority) from "eating their ham and cheese sandwich" - or, in other words, accessing the website. This would damage Slashdot long term as people would just stop reading it except for a few people at Universities and in Cybercafes, neither of which are appealing to Slashdot's advertisers.
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Re:Coral links (Score:5, Insightful)
Either just figure out the url to the original content, stop reading slashdot at work and get some *work* done, convince your administrators/managers that you should be allowed to view content on a nonstandard port so you can spend more company time browsing the web, or leave and find a different job.
For a website which is devoted to shoveling up information for the most elitist of all computer-literate people [including some bright individuals], you'd think that somehow, a better system could be put into place than "bomb websites with loads of traffic, indiscriminantly".
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Biblical Icons (Score:5, Funny)
If you like icons (Score:3, Informative)
Bad joke about icons (believe it or not) (Score:5, Funny)
Q. Once upon a time a mouse became trapped in a Russian cathedral; how did he escape?
A. He clicked on an icon and opened a window.
(I can't claim credit for that one...)
Icon progess... (Score:4, Insightful)
Now that icons are commonly 24 bit color or more and use complex shading and styles they are often more difficult to identify at a glance than 2-color monochrome icons. (Icons should always be capable of being represented as a 2-color monochrome icons to ensure they have enough visual contrast)
And with all of the varying styles these days, if you don't make your icons specific to each operating environment then they stick out like sore a thumb.
The days of 16-color icons were probably the best because you could make a decent icon without having to be an artist or having an expensive paint program.
It still boggles my mind how many people choose bad icons for their products. I currently have the joy of working with a particular software product where many of the different configuration tools all have slightly different pictures of little computer... looking things with some kind of network dealy around them, and I keep getting them all mixed up. Of course part of the problem is that the programs aren't very well organized to begin with and the fact that they keep changing the program names in each version proves that.
Anyway, it is important that any application have a clear distinct purpose, a good icon to reflect that purpose and then to stick with it as people learn what it symbolized.
Remember, Icons literally become a language to people!
A little credit to the inventor (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Google Cache (Score:5, Informative)
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