New Switcher icon

I am using Michael Drake’s NewestLook tool sprites (which are a variation of Chris Wraight’s Steel theme) on my Raspberry Pi. See https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/2/topics/209?page=9

I dislike the cog as a Switcher icon and while the Pi sprite isn’t too bad, I much prefer replacing it with the old Acorn switcher although I know it can’t be used in any official distro for trademark reasons. I’m personally using the Acorn sprite nicked from Paul Vigay’s !MiscSetup. It looks fine – is there a better Acorn sprite than this though? It could do with being cleaned up a little. Maybe higher res with a little less 3D effect. I’d happily PayPal someone enough for a pint or two if they’d create one for me – unless one already exists?

My current desktop:

There’s the RISC OS 3.8 (Phoebe) one in Boot:Resources.!ThemeDefs.Themes.Ursula.Sprites22, if that’ll work?

Yup, that would do except it’s really pixellated these days…

Why aren’t you using Tinct? If you use the OS for bitmap rendering in NetSurf you don’t get alpha channel support. (See the reflection under “RISC OS OPEN”.) I’m aware Tinct doesn’t work on ARMv7, but I thought it was fine on ARMv6.

I turned ‘Direct to Screen’ back on in netsurf a while ago. Some websites open really slowly otherwise. Whatever the problem is/was with tinct on ARMv7 doesn’t seem to be happening.

I’m not sure what you’re saying Chris.

Tinct is known to be incompatible with ARMv7. I was asking about Gavin’s use on a Raspberry Pi, which is ARMv6, I believe.

‘Direct to Screen’, ‘Dithered’ and ‘Error diffused’ all mean to use Tinct. They all do ‘Direct to Screen’ if you’re in a 32bpp screen mode. The only difference is when you’re in say 8bpp, where ‘Error diffused’ will look much better, or 16bpp. There’s generally no point in having it set to anything other than ‘Error diffused’, unless you can’t make use of Tinct at all.

I assumed the problem with tinct was due to unaligned loads causing an alignment exception.

I much prefer replacing it with the old Acorn switcher

I’m with you there, Gavin. I knocked up one from somewhere. However, I’m firmly of the belief that the switcher icon identifies the OS, and consequently should be used in all ‘system’ icons: http://twitpic.com/b4dr1v/full

I made those icons in the early days of RISC OS 3. They were designed to echo the RISC OS 2 icons whilst switching the Acorn logo for the old Archimedes logo (but retained much of its ‘shape’).

I also think icons should be icons, not pictures or illustrations; that colour is an important aid to recognition; that the skeuomorphic ‘folded paper corner’ has no place on audio files, sprites, modules or absolutes and therefore by extension any file at all; and that directories should be blue, dammit. :-)

Mind you, I remember what the icons for Arthur looked like. And the Master Compact UI. Shoot me.

and that directories should be blue, dammit. :-)

YES!

Nice icons, BTW. Modern(ish) with a retro feel.

Where did this turned-paper idea come from anyway? Was the black-border-around-files not clear enough?

It was a RISC OS 4 thing. Perhaps because some other OS had it and someone thought that was the reason RISC OS wasn’t seen as a “proper OS”!

It’s because of semantics. RISC OS had “files” and “directories”. Some other OSes had “documents” and “folders” and there was a desire to move that way. I don’t believe an MP3 is a “document”. Documents are files, but files aren’t necessarily documents. I’m more flexible over the word “folder” though – after all that is what the icon represents.

Mind you, we also have some image formats represented as discs, which nevertheless open as a filer window (they’re disk images after all). Which is why my icon for file_fc8 is a folder with a hard disc icon on it.

The foldy corner skeuomorphism is outdated though, and is already becoming abstracted or sometimes entrely removed.

Modern(ish) with a retro feel.

Compare them with their RISC OS 2 predecessors to see the direct progression. They were also an experiment in adding something to icons without losing their ‘iconic’ nature – the linear graduation uses the standard 256 colour palette.

I’m not a fan of text in icons (I kept them in the system icons for consistency) – one certainly shouldn’t be putting text into icons if there is any other way of representing the semantic concept. (Sadly as I’m a font specialist I do have seven different Font filetypes that are all the standard ‘F’ but with a textual “extension” in the corner – TTF, CFF, PFA, OTF, WOFF etc).

I’m also amused that Apple agree that folders/directories are blue.

There is a fairly good article about icon design here – note in particular the reference to Adobe’s poor icon design (which is entirely consistent with its UI design philosophy!).

It was a RISC OS 4 thing. Perhaps because some other OS had it and someone thought that was the reason RISC OS wasn’t seen as a “proper OS”!

Plus the fact that the turned corner icons had an element of 3-d about them as opposed to a flat 2-d first lesson in T-D circa 1969.
Burn me as a heretic but the commonest OS had a better icon set circa 1999 than RO has had in most incarnations.
The last set you linked to are quite intriguing and might point a direction for a decent concept.

Mind you most of the tool sprites in the themes people tout about look a tad naff to me.

Knocked up one in 24bpp (so no dithering on the colour gradations), both 90 & 180dpi variants: http://www.mediafire.com/?mkfi1125vwy3ua2

Why aren’t you using Tinct? If you use the OS for bitmap rendering in NetSurf you don’t get alpha channel support. (See the reflection under “RISC OS OPEN”.) I’m aware Tinct doesn’t work on ARMv7, but I thought it was fine on ARMv6.

I thought I had read somewhere that Tinct wasn’t happy with ARMv6 – hadn’t tried it to be honest, had just left it on the NetSurf default (in the Pi Alpha) of using the OS. (A quick test using Tinct, however, and it seems fine…)

Knocked up one in 24bpp (so no dithering on the colour gradations), both 90 & 180dpi variants: http://www.mediafire.com/?mkfi1125vwy3ua2

Thanks!

Ursula:

Paul’s:

Actually, they’re crappy compressed jpegs so don’t show how pixellated the Ursula one is. Paul’s one is clearly nicer for the acorn itself, although the edges are rough for some reason. But much appreciated :)

Also, notice the reflection on the acorn – I hadn’t realised this until last night (when trying to make my own) but Acorn seemed to have flipped their usual acorn image horizontally from their promo materials to their switcher icon (the “shine” on the acorn is at the other side).

Sorry about the jaggies – here’s a better version: http://www.mediafire.com/?jd18puwha57ief0

(that’s what I get for doing a quick-and-dirty downsample in !Paint heh)

Looks great, calm has been restored to my world! Can I PayPal you a pint? (Call it a mini-bounty!)

I wasn’t expecting anything for it, but hey, glad you like – I’m paul[at]jaffacakesandsodomy[dot]net. :)

I hadn’t realised this until last night (when trying to make my own) but Acorn seemed to have flipped their usual acorn image horizontally

That was my suggestion, IIRC. I complained to the guy doing the icons that the light source hitting it was from the opposite side to that on every other part of the desktop (e.g. the toolsprites), so he flipped it. Look at the shine on that screen in the Display Manager icon, for example. I still prefer it that way because the other way (light coming from the right) just jars for me.

That was my suggestion, IIRC. I complained to the guy doing the icons that the light source hitting it was from the opposite side to that on every other part of the desktop (e.g. the toolsprites), so he flipped it.

Well, it was a good call – it seems nicer to have the darker “shadowy” part of the Acorn switcher on the right hand side, near the right edge of the screen.

Yeah, I did that too. :-)