And what is "Original"? If it's the one in the recent XWin.exe then it's an icon with alpha too. I don't seen any different between the two on your screenshot.
Michael Bax wrote:
The new icon with alpha looks quite bad on Windows 2000 and earlier systems, with a thick white border -- see the attachment PNG. The tips of the X on some of the other versions of the icon also look slightly blunt (minor quibble), and the top and bottom rows are lost at 16x16.
That can be improved. I've been on a deadline at work for a couple weeks now so the 16x16 is basically a simple convertion from the original 360x360 that I'm using for to create all the icons.
Presumably we shouldn't be setting the default to something that uses a feature unsupported by the majority of systems out there! Alpha is nice, but it is a new, optional feature; we still need to support low-colour desktops by default.
I don't care about the majority of the systems out there. I care about the majority of the system using Cygwin/XFree. And that can be very different.
That has nothing to do with cygwin but look at this poll of what gamers have (http://steampowered.com/status/survey.html): 90% of the OS are WinXP.
Gamers tends to have very recent machines, so tend to have a recent OS. What I mean by giving this link is that the "majority" can differ greatly depending of what subset of people you're looking at.
Geeks (where I put Cygwin users), I assume, would have a recent machine as their working machine and older systems for support (firewall, server, ...).
So I would think that there are more XP machines out there than you think. Now, is it majority? I can't say but I would not be surprised at all if it were.
The other thing, IMHO, is that the alpha icon on non-alpha system, while not the best icon that can be on such system, is not completely ugly either. The problems with the 16x16 can easily be fixed.
So between an icon that looks best on recent machines but not as good on older ones and one that looks best on older machines but not as good as it can be on recent ones, I prefer to think "future/progress/whatever" and take the first.
Using the CVS icon as a starting point, I created a new icon using an outlined white square as the background. It is rendered at 16x16, 24x24 and 32x32 sizes, each for monochrome, 16 and 256 colours. It has the correct proportions of the thick and thin lines, properly anti-aliased and quantised. It's even rotationally invariant! :-)
I have attached two files: a comparison of the icons in Overview.png, and the improved icon in Improved.ico.
Between the CVS and your "improved", I prefer the one in CVS. The thin lines is acutally too thin in 16x16, the line is too blury on yours, the white background seems to wash over the black line.
Nahor
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