Creating an Aqua toolbar icon set

[aussie149]

[djpimley]

[sardisson]

[djpimley]

[Punto_Mac]

[sardisson]

[ovvldc]

[sardisson]

FYI: I split the last few posts off of the insane splashscreen/Finder icons topic to make this new topic for discussion of any efforts to create a new Aqua-styled set of icons to effectively replace the default set of toolbar/in-app icons (mostly toolbar at this point).

This thread will probably run long, too, but at least we have a relatively fresh start.

According to the venerable ZipIt, there are 7627 items in images.zip. Of that, there are *roughly* 42 folders. There are 133 icons that we currently replace with versions of the Finder icons. Roughly half the remaining icons are the high-contrast versions of the icons. Of remaining icons, there are a fair number of icons that appear to be used 4-5 times, there are many icons that are just big "X" characters in various colors, etc. Some icons are for widget features that hopefully will be NWFed/native filepickered away (e.g., the at-least-6 plus/minus icons, a number of "picture" icons).

Most of these icons are 16x16 in the small version and 26x26 (max) in the large version, but according to what I've read, there are some other sizes lurking, and there are some uses of "file icons" in that app (outside of the filepicker) that will never pick up the true Mac icons that we'll want to restyle at some point, some of which are 32x32.....

All icons are 32-bit PNGs with transparency.

You can unzip your NeoOffice.app/Contents/share/config/images.zip file to get at all the icons. (Aside from replacing the OOo app and OOo/SO document icons inside the app with Neo versions in all 4 sets, I don't think we want to touch the Crystal and Industrial sets, and if we do high-contrast versions of this Aqua set, we'll have essentially populated the HiContrast set....)

So that's roughly where we stand at the moment, as I understand it. The icon set will need to be GPL-compatible (which essentially means GPL or LGPL afaik) in order to be included in NeoOffice.

Smokey
Edit: add the file format, too

[ovvldc]

I just have a couple of things to add. First of all, a lot more has been said on this matter and if anyone feels the need to dig, this thread is a good place to start.

If you want to dabble in making or replacing icons, the Iconic program made by Brett is very useful: http://brettisangry.com/Iconic/

Good luck everyone!

best wishes,
Oz

[sardisson]

Oh, right; the original thread on the GUI icons That was a good thread, another wonderfully-long thread.

A large bit of it is concerned with "slotlists" and other technical details and blind men feeling their way around that thankfully was obsoleted by the OOo 2 codebase and the wonderful images.zip and some of it with radical new UI designs we can't do anything about. But there's a lot of good discussion on what people's sensibilities are, among other things that are still useful.

Another tip: If you're using Photoshop to create your icons, its PNGs can be quite bloated, so run a copy of them through something like PNGCrusher to drastically reduce the file size before adding to images.zip.

Smokey

[djpimley]

I like the look of what Punto_Mac's created so far and if it can be made GPL then it's a very promising start to a complete Aqua set. Maybe I can help out in future, it's really up to Punto_Mac since this is his gig.

[aussie149]

[sardisson]

/me wonders why in the heck there is a toolbar icon (or even a command!) for "can't undo" !?

(I suspect a better solution for that would be completely grey-out the icon, or barring that, the regular undo arrow with an X over it, as opposed to a completely new icon. I happen to think that icon looks pretty GNOMEy, but that's another thing entirely )

Personally, I'd prefer some sort of collaboration, 1) because Punto Mac and djpimley have both done great work so far and 2) because, well, selfishly, making 7000 icons will go a lot more quickly if we can have 2 or 3 designers in sync, working collaboratively

Smokey

[aussie149]

[sardisson]