Theoretically. The problem, as you can see from the File>New... icon in this screenshot in the original thread, is that the rest of the app "background" is all Windows-grey, so you'd only have little bits of brushed metal around the icons clashing with Windows-grey. If you poke around http://www.neooffice.com, you'll see the troubles Ed and Dan had trying to wipe out that grey and replace it with something more Mac-like (at least that's my read of it).
I figured that much. But if Ed, Dan and Patrick can take out the menu bars and put these into seperate little sticky windows (like MS Word v.X), we won't have to look at those ugly bits anymore.. I can live with grey looking rulers .
sardisson wrote:
I don't like those much personally, but they are a huge improvement over the stock set in Start OpenOffice.org.... A lot of the KDE OOo (internal) icons I've seen still look very Windows-y, if maybe a bit more XP than 95... The Gnome (?) set that began this all looks a lot more Mac-like, imho, but it's too fuzzy for me (particularly since I'm PowerBook-only).
Well, I'm on a 12" iBook so I suppose if I can read it, anyone can...
The thing is: For now, I'll settle for a halfway improvement that is cobbled together in a few hours, until a proper set can be drawn. I'll settle for WinXP-like icons right now as these are a lot nicer than the Win95 ones.
In the mean time we can test-drive Ed, Dan and Patrick's work in style .
sardisson wrote:
ovvldc wrote:
<resounding ovation for Ed, lasting a good five minutes>
Ditto (and of course for Patrick; Alpha 1 seems to really have re-energized the NeoOffice(J) "community" here!)
Of course! But Patrick now seems to have more fans than some Hollywood stars, so I figured I didn't need to applaud him more than I already have <G>.
sardisson wrote:
ovvldc wrote:
OOo needs new icons on *every* platform..
I'll let someone else tackle that response
Yes, let's leave that to Sun for now. Sending out a call on resexcellence and a few other places will do for us. Maybe the Sun people will get inspired when they see how pretty their app can be..
So what does the new set require:
22x22 icons for every button, maybe in other sizes as well (I'd prefer 28x28 if Patrick can do it), in transparent PNG format.
Several sizes of file icons for the various formats, as usual for the Mac.
Aqua compatible styling.
A simple and modern, but above all, clear design. OOo and NeoOffice have been using relatively small buttons so, not too many frills, please.
Compatible license terms.
Do we want a specific color scheme? Maybe something compatible with the drab grey of the rest of the app (and can that be made a slightly lighter shade, please)?
Maybe different colors for different toolbars to make them easier to reference, or one basic set that can be done in many colors, depending on the mood of the admin/user? Or just whatever the artists feel like?
I am not sure if we have any other (technical) requirements. Please comment. I am curious how this kind of call works..
Since we are talking about requirements, I think this is a good time for me to list what I would need to integrate any new artwork into Neo/J.
Like I told Fridrich for the WordPerfect filter, I need to have any new files plus any necessary patches to the Neo/J makefile to integrate these new files into the Neo/J build.
Neo/J has become nearly a full-time (unpaid) job for me and, as a result, if someone does not do the tedious work to integrate the icons into the installation phase of build, there is a very low likelihood that any icons that you send me will make it into Neo/J. So, before you put out a call for graphics designers, I would suggest that you line up someone to handle the Neo/J build issues first.
Hopefully, that should not be too much of hurdle. Also, this requirement of mine will (I hope), result in a few more people who understand (and can work with) the Neo/J build.
A lot of the KDE OOo (internal) icons I've seen still look very Windows-y, if maybe a bit more XP than 95... The Gnome (?) set that began this all looks a lot more Mac-like, imho, but it's too fuzzy for me (particularly since I'm PowerBook-only).
P.S. Is the "fuzziness" of the other set of icons partly due to the 72dpi/96dpi hack that Patrick used for the NO/J interface?
My screenshot is actually from X11, so it's not the dpi hack. The icons just seemed fuzzy...I have noticed things seem fuzzier on the LCD than CRTs--things I can't find tolerable on my Mac seem much better on our department's iMac that just went OS X.
JKT wrote:
Having just downloaded them, there is an "Aqua" set of .png images which are distinctly MacOS X based. So anyone got any pointers on how we do get to use these ones in place of the defaults?
I think this is the $64 million question. All of the Linux GUI places seem to have scripts that roll something or patch something, but that's beyond my comprehension. As I mentioned earlier, my searching of the OOo website didn't bring up anything I could fathom talking about how the icons were created/packaged/etc., and we do need to have someone figure that out (as Patrick mentions above), even if it's not the icon artist (and prob. shouldn't be).
The Gnome set seems to be a couple of bmps and an RGB+Alpha png (with individual icons arranged sequentially, horizontally, 10500x20; who knows which file is actually being used, and why the "grey" is not being masked correctly when the icon is "selected") and the imagelist.xml, and they all end up in "user prefs" rather than being "built" as the default icons....
Edit: I recall all the icons being looose in 1.0.3/NeoJ 0.x.x (/Applications/NeoOfficeJ-084.app/Contents/share/config/symbol ), but that same folder in 1.1 contains some random non-icon bmps I've never seen used.
Smokey
Last edited by sardisson on Mon Sep 13, 2004 4:37 pm; edited 1 time in total
Joined: Sep 09, 2004 Posts: 25 Location: Paris, France
Posted: Mon Sep 13, 2004 3:04 pm Post subject:
In addition, I have been playing with the KDE set and the Gnome one. The KDE set is nice if you use a size of 18x18.
However, I noticed that if you install these alternate sets, you cannot "customize" the icons in the toolbars anymore (through toolbar/Customize/Icons), you seem to only have available the masks of the old icons (except for the first ones, the ones in share/config/symbols).
So I guess you need to replace something more that soffice.cfg...
However, I noticed that if you install these alternate sets, you cannot "customize" the icons in the toolbars anymore (through toolbar/Customize/Icons), you seem to only have available the masks of the old icons (except for the first ones, the ones in share/config/symbols).
So I guess you need to replace something more that soffice.cfg...
That would explain why the grey around the icons is not being masked correctly when an icon is selected.
I see that the soffice.cfg/Bitmaps folder has two apparently identical sets of files: userimages.bmp and hcuserimages.bmp, each with a matching, 0-byte *userimagesmask.bmp. So there's the masking problem
I wish the SO/OOo engineers hadn't rolled the icons into some hidden location...it makes trying to figure out what's going on a real chore....
The Gnome set seems to be a couple of bmps and an RGB+Alpha png (with individual icons arranged sequentially, horizontally, 10500x20; who knows which file is actually being used, and why the "grey" is not being masked correctly when the icon is "selected") and the imagelist.xml, and they all end up in "user prefs" rather than being "built" as the default icons....
FYI. If you design any icons, they should be 8 or 24 bit images with 1 bit transparency mask images, not 32 bit. If an icon set has backgrounds colors as part of the image, they are not using a transparency mask.
BTW, the Ximian icons that many people keep asking me to use are 32 bit and, as such, Ximian has a whole bunch of patches to the vcl code to handle 32 bit image display. Since Neo/J is not X11, most of the Ximian patches aren't usable by Neo/J.
Joined: Sep 09, 2004 Posts: 25 Location: Paris, France
Posted: Tue Sep 14, 2004 4:14 am Post subject:
While we are on the subject, if anybody wants to play with the KDE icons, the scripts looks into your .sversionrc file to find the installation of OOo, even through to tell it not to. What I did is install in OOo/X11 and then copy the soffice.cfg dir to NeoOfficeJ.
These icons don't seem to use transparency. Hence, the script builds them for a specific background color. I can't help noticing that while the OOo regular drab gray is #c0c0c0, the scripts defaults to #f1f1f1. So you need to change that. However, it seems to me that the latter color may be closer to aqua colors. Does anybody know if there is a simple way to change the background UI color in OOo and/or NeoJ?
Does anybody know if there is a simple way to change the background UI color in OOo and/or NeoJ?
Tools>Options>NeoOffice/J>Appearance lets you change some of the OOo colors, but unfortunately not the background color of the "toolbars," which also must be hard-coded somewhere
I'm guessing Ed might know where it is (if you were a latecomer to the OOo/Neo boat like I was, check out Ed's OOo section on his personal site, esp. http://www.dashboardbuddha.com/OOo/first_aqua.html and the Neo Yeti and Neo Goblin screenshots, to see what he and Dan were doing "on the side of on the side," and what I guess may be coming, very slowly, to NeoJ in the future).
(Apologies if I've misrepresented any of this; as I mentioned, I arrived after all of it had happened.)
If someone knows where it is, and if it's as easy as just substituting another hex color, that might be a very quick interim measure (before the aqua stripes) to improve the look a bit. Of course, we might also have to change the background on the default icons then, too, or ship a new "default" set (or find the current icons in the OOo source tree and see if they are "transparent/pink" or grey).... Either way, it might be a step closer to a Aqua/Mac-like internal icons....
Posted: Tue Sep 14, 2004 3:39 pm Post subject: Moving around menu items for a more Mac-like layout
This is so far from icons, but my "color scheme" comment in the previous post made me think of it.
There's also a limited ability to modify the menus, which might be another thing that could be done, ad interim, to make NeoJ more Mac-like (don't know whether it will still work with Ed's Native Menus, but then again those might make this hint/kludge obsolete).
Tools>Configure>Menus
I added the "Options" item (as seen on Tools) to my Edit menu and renamed it Preferences.
Unfortunately, cmd-comma is not one of the (hardcoded! ) list of keyboard shortcuts (Tools>Configure>Keyboard) available, so you can't add that.
But every so often there are posts about menu items being in crazy menus in OOo/NeoJ, so if someone wanted to spend some time re-arranging the "wrong" items in the menus....
Smokey
Last edited by sardisson on Fri Oct 08, 2004 2:37 am; edited 1 time in total
Joined: Sep 18, 2003 Posts: 434 Location: London, UK
Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 5:49 am Post subject: Re: Moving around menu items for a more Mac-like layout
sardisson wrote:
But every so often there are posts about menu items being in crazy menus in OOo/NeoJ, so if someone wanted to spend some time re-arranging the "wrong" items in the menus....
This has far more to do with it being an MS Office clone than anything - MS Office for the Mac has always had its "Options" in the Tools menu and never had a "Preferences" in the Edit menu. I assume that the reason for that is because this is where it is on the PC versions so rather than making it Mac-like they kept it "compatible" with the PC version.
Nice tip about how to make OOo/NeoJ more Mac-like though, thanks.
Edit: Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why I loathe using Office so much - the interface just isn't any good. It is adequate rather than being great and there has been near-zero innovation by MS or other office-suite developers for years on this front. I posted this a while ago on these boards (in the Random Thoughts, I think), but I'm hoping that when it comes to the time for OOo to develop into a fully fledged Mac app, they consider some new interface concepts - personally I would like to see something akin to the palettes that OmniGroup developed for OmniGraffle 3. The way they function is far less obtrusive than the various palettes and toolbars in MS and other Office applications, yet they are still able to pack in many fold more options and features - and relevant features too. _________________ PBG4, 1.5GHz, SuperDrive, 1GB RAM, 128MB VRAM, 5400rpm 80GB HD, MacOS X 10.4.5
Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 4:17 pm Post subject: Re: Moving around menu items for a more Mac-like layout
JKT wrote:
sardisson wrote:
But every so often there are posts about menu items being in crazy menus in OOo/NeoJ, so if someone wanted to spend some time re-arranging the "wrong" items in the menus....
This has far more to do with it being an MS Office clone than anything - MS Office for the Mac has always had its "Options" in the Tools menu and never had a "Preferences" in the Edit menu. I assume that the reason for that is because this is where it is on the PC versions so rather than making it Mac-like they kept it "compatible" with the PC version.
Hmm. I keep wondering what the difference is if you select a Macintosh feel from the preferences window. Or is that deprecated in NeoOffice/J?
OK, so that makes for the following UI tasks:
* get new menu icons (how is the draft call?)
* get new file icons to match (sorry, Smokey)
* find and fix the background colour
* fix an icon-set
* rearrange the menu until it is Mac-sane.
* somehow put the menu in the top bar and the buttons in seperate sticky windows (Ed and Patrick working their magic)
Now, doing the fifth of these is not so hard, but how does one include it in a build? I haven't done any serious coding for at least 15 years...
Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 10:42 pm Post subject: Re: Moving around menu items for a more Mac-like layout
ovvldc wrote:
Hmm. I keep wondering what the difference is if you select a Macintosh feel from the preferences window. Or is that deprecated in NeoOffice/J?
I believe somewhere in the 0.8 series Patrick made that the default. It emulates the Platinum appearance (as well as an ugly grey GUI can)
ovvldc wrote:
* get new file icons to match (sorry, Smokey)
I never claimed to be an icon designer At some point someone mentioned file icons, Patrick mentioned he was going to use the ship (app) icon as file icons (rather than the OS-generated default blank document they were then), and I had some time on my hands and figured I could at least composite some icons that looked like documents rather than just the ship
ovvldc wrote:
* rearrange the menu until it is Mac-sane.
Now, doing the fifth of these is not so hard, but how does one include it in a build? I haven't done any serious coding for at least 15 years...
I don't know how these are included/delivered as defaults (probably hard-coded again), but the user-generated ones end up as .xml files in that soffice.cfg we've been discussing, apparently one for each module (writer, calc, etc.), but these xml files can at the very least be delivered to the ~/Library/NeoOfficeJ-1.1/user/config/soffice.cfg after the fact. Not great, but a still possible improvement if we can't find anything.
It's really looking like we also need a "UI czar/Patrick helper" to look through the OOo code/cvs and find where all the things we want to change are hidden
Smokey
(Oh dear, I walked off and never posted this, and now six hours later....)
As I mentioned earlier, my searching of the OOo website didn't bring up anything I could fathom talking about how the icons were created/packaged/etc.,...
What I did is install in OOo/X11 and then copy the soffice.cfg dir to NeoOfficeJ.
To avoid install OOo/X11 (I suppose is not a 5 min work) why not post yours soffice.cfg as .tar.gz file like ooo_theme_mini.tar.gz?
Maybe we can have a 'Macification pack' that throws around the icons and menus for NeoOffice/J or OOo/X11. That is, until we get a settings detective who knows how and where to put this in the CVS.
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