I did most of the icons in 1999 (a few of them still exist in core as tree icons for nodes that are not typically shown anymore); in 2000 they were taken over by Sun's Human Interface Engineering team, and everything was converted to the (awful) "flush 3d" metal look and feel look. Circa 2004 we got out from under the tyrrany of metal look and feel, and they were redesigned again by a guy whose name I can't remember, but could probably dig up - that redesign established the shapes still in use for things like classes, fields and methods. Since then there was one reworking of the icons that made them more cartoonish (I remember Wade calling it "NetBeans for babies").
I think in the long run, switching to vector icons is smart. That said, I would not run with SVG without precompiling it into code that drives a Graphics2D and either renders and caches images, or deals with performance and memory allocation issues around GradientPaint and friends in the JDK (both allocate large rasters on every paint, and vertical and horizontal and radial gradients can be cached and reused instead - AND the pixel pushing approach of those has a serious impedance mismatch with modern graphics pipelines - it happens that just this week I benchmarked cached gradient BufferedImages vs GradientPaint and RadialGradientPaint with as much raster caching as you could do there - the result was blitting BufferedImages was 10x faster, and 40x faster if you ran a full GC between benchmark loops, meaning that performance with Paint objects is also much less predictable). One of the rationales for JavaFX's creation was to have a graphics toolkit that operated with the grain of how modern graphics cards work, rather than 1990s xterms did things. -Tim On Fri, Apr 5, 2019 at 7:09 PM Eirik Bakke <eba...@ultorg.com> wrote: > There are over 3000 bitmap icon images in the NetBeans codebase. Probably > at least several hundred of these are frequently seen by everyday NetBeans > users. The page below shows all the unique "gif" or "png" files that > existed in the NetBeans mercurial repo prior to the Apache transition: > > htps://people.csail.mit.edu/ebakke/misc/icons.html > > THE QUESTION: Does anyone know who actually designed and drew these icons? > > I assume some were cobbled together from various sources, but on the other > hand, many of the frequently visible ones (e.g. the ones in the toolbars) > seem to follow a quite consistent visual style. > > (This question relates to the effort of making NetBeans look better on > HiDPI/Retina screens; see separate email thread.) > > -- Eirik > > -- http://timboudreau.com
