Great pieces of advice here (and in another threads).
A summary with some more ideas:
== Color Scheme:
If we're to redesign icons we may want to define a color scheme first.
As Glenn points out the color scheme should play nice with color blind
users and also play nice with the different LaFs we use frequently
(including dark ones such as Darcula).
== Precompiling
As Tim points out we don't want to waste CPU/GPU time rendering
gradients for icons at runtime.
We could define some "standard" sizes for icons and precompile them to
these sizes. Very much like native mobile apps do for Android an iOS. In
iOS, for example, they have @1x, @2x, @3x suffixes for different icons
sizes.
That, of course will require a project/repository of its own.
== Standardizing
If we're to precompile icons we may also want to standardize them
somehow. We could separate icons by cluster (in the repository above),
and create a cluster-specific module responsible for returning icons (of
appropriate size depending on DPI) for all modules in that cluster.
The objective being making all "folder" icons look similar. We now have
blue folders and yellow folders all around.
== Generating SVG from PNG
See Tim's response in another thread [1]. I think Emilian set up a
website in 2017 to do this [2].
I don't think automatic conversion is worth the effort: we'll end up
having to fine-tune the results by hand, as Emilian tried to do back in
2017.
Also note that Adobe Illustrator seems to have a way to do this:
https://www.lifewire.com/use-image-trace-in-adobe-illustrator-cc-2017-4125254
Cheers,
Antonio
[1]
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/netbeans-dev/201904.mbox/%3cCA+qecRNnE=L49v5t46q_LVc=rpTqJD3U7zt4-0DAroG=x6h...@mail.gmail.com%3e
[2]
https://jaxenter.com/netbeans/netbeans-retina
El 06/04/2019 a las 19:50, Tim Boudreau escribió:
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
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