Possible Icon Set

[gruso]

Keep up the awesome work taltoris! My only wishlist item at this point is a battery indicator with smaller steps, say six or more. I realise this is fiddly work, and also depends on how the firmware reports battery life. But the three stage indicator on the GP2X really sucks.

 

[gruad]

These look great. I especially like the subtle differences between the image icons.

Some nitpicking though:
I could do without the spark on the battery icons. Also the network (?) icon with the globe looks a bit off. The huge shapeless blobs of solid black on the globe don't go well with the rest of the set and the whole thing looks a bit unbalanced. I know that this is how the earth actually looks, but a more artistic and less realistic approach might be better.

 

[GuSec]

Totally awesome icon-set!
I got a request for the music files though. You could separate the lossless from the compressed ones. Mp3, ogg, and stuff like that with one icon-set (different colours though). Then use a different set for wav and flac, it would be a bit more pedagogic. But it's just a suggestion.
Anyway, great job man!
(First post...)

 

[MarkoeZ]

While we are nitpicking your absolutely great iconset

The HD logo seems kind of rotated compared to the trash icon. Dunno if this is a optical illusion thing because of the different shapes but that's how it seems. Nothing that would prevent me using them though

Edit:might be the different coloured front of the 3d shape, not sure.

 

[jbr]

Keep up the awesome work taltoris! My only wishlist item at this point is a battery indicator with smaller steps, say six or more. I realise this is fiddly work, and also depends on how the firmware reports battery life. But the three stage indicator on the GP2X really sucks.

Yes, I have been thinking about this too. Going along with my dynamic icon approach, it would be very interesting to make the battery icon an svg with the length of the "charge" rectangle being variable and changed to reflect the actual voltage reported by the firmware.

Again, this may not be possible, but (on the whole) it seems like a simple enough feature that modern desktop environments should really support. I find it a little bit disturbing, actually, that no one seems to have ever heard of something like this.

 

[CandidStan]

Keep up the awesome work taltoris! My only wishlist item at this point is a battery indicator with smaller steps, say six or more. I realise this is fiddly work, and also depends on how the firmware reports battery life. But the three stage indicator on the GP2X really sucks.

Yes, I have been thinking about this too. Going along with my dynamic icon approach, it would be very interesting to make the battery icon an svg with the length of the "charge" rectangle being variable and changed to reflect the actual voltage reported by the firmware.

Again, this may not be possible, but (on the whole) it seems like a simple enough feature that modern desktop environments should really support. I find it a little bit disturbing, actually, that no one seems to have ever heard of something like this.

 

[taltoris]

About the battery, I don't know if I can add in extra "steps" to make a better approximation or not. The reason I only used 3 is because that's how many are listed here. Also, I thought about making it turn red when approaching empty, but couldn't find a way to make it look right. In the end, I decided to keep the color the way it is for the sake of consistency.

And yeah, the hard drive icon isn't quite there yet, and some of the transparency looks way better on light than on black right now. Still tweaking...

Some people have suggested a more dynamic approach to have the system find the files and place the appropriate badge on them or automatically adjust the battery. All I can say is that, while nice, this is not my area of expertise. If someone would build it, or create an add-on to matchbox to have it handle SVG files, that would be great. But I imagine most of the devs who are capable of this feat are working on more important features.

One more thing. Although I've been making these icons, I have not actually been able to test them in matchbox, because I haven't quite been able to set it up right in Ubuntu. But I have seen them in some screenshots already, so I guess some people have been able to figure it out.

 

[rokdcasbah]

Cool beans. I have one criticism (which I hope is taken in the context of "I still really like these"): I don't think the transparent blue rounded rectangles on the icons are necessary. Maybe you could make a case for them underneath the filetype indicators, but for the folders they seem to be extraneous.

Not that they don't look good there but given the target media (smallish screen) and usage (computer GUI) I think they should be as simple as possible while still looking good. The blue boxes are nice but don't add much functionally.

Still, great work.

To everyone talking about having live vector icons: if the rest of the interface is made scalable, you might have a point (I'll forget for a moment that we are not talking about a 1/2 KW desktop computer with lots of muscle). If it is not, then there's not much reason to avoid bitmaps.

 

[taltoris]

Cool beans. I have one criticism (which I hope is taken in the context of "I still really like these"): I don't think the transparent blue rounded rectangles on the icons are necessary. Maybe you could make a case for them underneath the filetype indicators, but for the folders they seem to be extraneous.

Not that they don't look good there but given the target media (smallish screen) and usage (computer GUI) I think they should be as simple as possible while still looking good. The blue boxes are nice but don't add much functionally.

Well, I disagree. Because you have a small screen, you should have large icons for files to make browsing effortless. Extraneous? Perhaps. But I think that the "coolness" factor makes up for it.

Anyhow, they are there to stay in this icon set. Once I'm done I'll release the SVG so you can go through and pull the emblems off if you'd like.

And I have a treat for you guys today. The good stuff, icons for cartridges:

Enjoy.

 

[Pleng]

About the battery... Also, I thought about making it turn red when approaching empty, but couldn't find a way to make it look right.

It's not supposed to look right when it's nearly empty. It's supposed to look vile and out-of-place so that it draws your eye away from the rest of the screen! "Uggh... what's that ugly thing in the corner? Oh sh!t it's the low battery inidcator... I better put it on to charge!"

 

[Pandorous]

About the battery, I don't know if I can add in extra "steps" to make a better approximation or not. The reason I only used 3 is because that's how many are listed here. Also, I thought about making it turn red when approaching empty, but couldn't find a way to make it look right. In the end, I decided to keep the color the way it is for the sake of consistency.


Hmmm. Is there no way to use actual numbers? I kinda like numbers for these things. The icons are pretty but you get greater resolution with numbers and it's nice to know just how close to its last, dieing gasps something is.

P.

 

[Squidge]

It's not supposed to look right when it's nearly empty. It's supposed to look vile and out-of-place so that it draws your eye away from the rest of the screen! "Uggh... what's that ugly thing in the corner? Oh sh!t it's the low battery inidcator... I better put it on to charge!"

We can have the battery indicator flashing, plus we can flash the LEDs on the device itself in an annoying enough fashion to get people to plug in the charger

 

[TaG]

Could you incorporate icons like in jbr's sig for the roms?

Not sure quite how it would be made to fit with the theme.

edit:typo

 

[taltoris]

Pretty big update. Here are all the file icons so far:

Some minor changes have been made to some of the other icons, but nothing big yet. SVG file, again, is here.

Could you incorporate icons like in jbr's sig for the roms?

Those icons are indeed sweet, but I don't think they would work in the symbolic sense, for roms. Those would probably be more appropriate for the emulators themselves.

By the way, I am ok with constructive criticism and everything, but just remember that this is a work in progress and I'll probably be fiddling with the specifics for awhile before I'm satisfied.

edit: Already tweaked it enough to outdate that file. Put a new one up.

 

[joseluisjazz]

@taltoris

The icons do look really good.

Only a thing, AFAICS you're making small changes to the pictures between different extensions on the same category, changing colors and things like that, apart from the boxed text that represents the extension. I perceive that as confusing for the user. Specially on the document, code and picture file types. (And that zip on the zip files it's a funny blink but I don't think those icons are going to be homegeneus with the rest of the compressed types... I'd go with a single picture for every main type. With the possible exception of rom files. But that's just my humble opinion as a user...

EDIT:
Ok, I've been re-thinking and maybe your intention is to have a different picture for each extension. That could be fine and beautiful, but it's a hard work... But then what I don't get is the purpose that the boxed text fills then...

 

[taltoris]

I'm nearing completion with the design portion. After that, I'll work on tweaking and batch exporting all of them.

Tell me what you think, specifically of the file and folder icons:

Edit: Minor fixes...

 

[joseluisjazz]

Aah, ok, now it makes more sense to me with the adittion of those generic filetype icons. And it's getting pretty beautiful.

The first thing i noticed is that probably the design in the music files is gonna be too thin on the pandora. I can't be sure until i see it on the real device but I get the impression that the code files and the music files are too similar.

If I got it correctly you've inverted the background color between scripts and compiled-language sourcecode files, and between lossy audio and lossless audio? But there are some grey areas in there, like wma which can be lossy or lossless, and ogg container can have flac inside...

Also, it seems you intended to do something similar with the image formats, but png and bmp would have inverted background then I think, (as well as svg but there is a mixture between bitmaps and vectorial in there that I can't grasp...)
EDIT: oh, I see. Vectorial files have a dark border around the geometric shapes in the icon.

I miss djvu format there too. For the sake of completeness it should be similar to the pdf one but the current pdf icon is too pdfish that I can't imagine how to do that.

And why is there a difference between sh files and the rest of scripts?

 

[Epoch]

I would request an icon for matroska files.

The file and folder icons look great, but the perspective of the hard drive, trash bin and cd icons are not all the same. They look like the perspective has been shifted on them relative to eachother. I may be wrong about that but that is how they seem to look to me. I would recommend that you keep the same perspective on all them.

With the wireless signal strength indicator you may want to have the empty bars as translucent and filled bars as opaque, or just much closer to opaque if you wanted to use transparency in that icon. I also see one of the icons duplicated in that set that you just posted, is there another icon to be used for showing no signal?

 

[Capn_Fish]

I really want to make these the icons on my laptop now... I assume there will be an icon .tar.gz/package/similar made available when they're finished?

The only thing that's hit me as important and missing ATM is .bz2. A USB/removable drive icon could be nice as well, though not really necessary.

Keep it up!

EDIT: And an SD card icon! That also falls under the "nice, but not really necessary" category (for me, at least).

 

[adamorjames]

Hmm.. need MKV, APE, JS, GZ, and TAR (could be used for both tar and tar.gz).