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MyIsoIcons.readme
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MYISOICONS 1.0
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Short: Icons in isometric style a la NewIcons
Author: dw@itu1.sun.ac.za <David Wiles>
Uploader: dw@itu1.sun.ac.za <David Wiles>
Type: pix/icon
Distribution: World
Long: A set of IFF pics that can be used to create icons in the style
of the "NewIcons" package. Various elements can be combined to create
an icon to your personal preferences.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTION:
The Amiga USENET newsgroups have been filled recently with lengthy threads
debating the respective merits of MagicWorkBench and the "ALL-NEW" NewIcons
package. Each party has venomantly defended his respective package with all
the passion of an Islamic Jihad, both with equally valid points.
The "Foreword" of Roger McVey, included in the "NewIcons" package, is a case
in point and I will not add fuel to the fire by nit-picking the concepts
that he tried to convey. Give it a read should you feel so inclined.
Truth is, I use elements of both systems. There are some MUI applications
that really work for me, Iconian and FBase being just two of them that
spring to mind. NewIcons has some nice imagery and icon colouring concepts.
My WorkBench has elements of both UI's in it. It is only a 4-colour hi-res
640 X 512 Workbench. It is fast, efficient and highly optimised, and it
works for me. Should I want to impress a visitor to my home, I usually use
a 16-colour preset that I have saved in my Prefs/Presets drawer for such an
occassion. Then realistic marbled backgrounds and "whizz-bang!" colours are
needed. When the guests leave, suitably impressed with the Amiga's
capabilities, I return to my old "minimalist" WorkBench. For me "less is
more".
So here you have it. A small collection of IFF pictures that you can use to
create icons for a lot of your applications. If you want to "NewIcon" them,
be my guest. If you want to add other colours other than the original 4,
feel free. It is in your hands!
THE ISOMETRIC ICON HISTORY ACCORDING TO ME:
Way back in prehistory when Fred Fish had just released his 600th
"AmigaLibDisk", I bought the Fred Fish Collection on CD-ROM. I was the proud
new owner of a CD-TV, and this was my first purchase to supplement my
"Welcome Disk". Residing on Fish Disk 546 was an archive called Icons.lha by
Kenneth Jennings (take a bow, Kenneth!). He had created a set of icons based
on the GEM windowing system and a rather innovative set of "isometric" icons
based on the icon imagery of a Silicon Graphics Personal Iris system. I
really likes the "new" look that he had created and used quite a few of his
icon images in my own. He made some very valid points regarding the tendency
of icons in general to be huge, gaudy and downright ugly. His solution
offered a consistant "feel" to the design of icons.
Shortly after this the "AmigaWorld" magazine had an article featuring
similar icon imagery. I never saw this but the rdmicons.lha collection and
IsoIcons8.lha appeared on Aminet FTP sites shortly afterwards. They were
mostly the work of Roger McVey (Take a bow, Roger!) With my newfound access
to InterNet, UN*X and FTP, I eagerly downloaded the archives. Roger's work
was very creative, and impressed me greatly. A lot credit should go to Eric
Penn too, he cleaned up Roger's collection quite nicely and added an
installation script. (take a bow, Eric!) So my "IsoIcon" collection grew and
began to take on the kind of look that I wanted from an Amiga WorkBench.
In the later half of 1994, Roger McVey once again impressed us all with his
"NewIcons" package. (you've taken a bow already, Roger!) It was a rather
innovative way of displaying icon imagery, as well as allowing AGA-equipped
Amigas to display icons in their correct colours. Credit is also due to
Nicola Salmoria, and Phillip Vedovatti for their input into the package.
(Gentlemen, you know what to do!)
Then the debate started...MWB or NewIcons, and that is where I get off.
THE MYISOICONS CLIPART COLLECTION:
This IFFs are the result of over a year worth of fiddling on my part. I am
a lazy SOB when I put my mind to it, and tend to accept the mediocre drivel
of icon imagery that comes with most commercial packages. Hence my WorkBench
tends to be a clutter of icons waiting for my attention. I started slowly to
recreate icons for my Amiga using DPaintIV AGA and a number of icon-creating
utilities including Iconian 1.97▀ by Chad Randall, and Iconizer 1.0 by Tom
Ekstr÷m (part of the IconPack distribution).
WHAT TO DO WITH IT?:
The IFFs consist of finished icons with both the Normal and Selected image.
All that is really required is to load the respective IFF into your paint
program and cut out a brush of the image that you want. There are dozens of
utilities in the Public Domain that will load and convert IFF brushes into
icons. Give WorkBench's IconEdit a miss. It is a total loss when it comes to
the simplest of tasks.
Also are "clips" of various items that can be combined with each other to
create a unique icon according to your needs. There are arrows, computers,
disks that can be used in a variety of ways.
The IFFs are 16-colour 640 X 512 resolution bitmaps. All of the icons use
the first 4 colours only. I left the other 12 colours unused so that you
could create 8 or 16-colour icons. I often use the unused colours to draw
temporary construction lines or to test a special effect.
I have added a "screen grab" or two to the archive, just so that you can see
how the icons look on my WorkBench. My 16-colour "blow their socks off"
WorkBench is also included. I have grown rather fond of the "grey, black,
white and blue" default palette of WB 2.0 and up. :-7 (Remember the
WorkBench 1.2 ans 1.3 default colours? -Barff!)
CAVEAT:
Eric Penn (of the IsoIcons8.lha fame) notes a very annoying habit of
WorkBench's Icon Edit (amongst other badly programmed icon editors)
regarding extra bitplanes hidden within icon images. I quote from his
documentation accompanying the archive:
---<snip>---
"A warning:
If you do decide that the icons for that favorite app is not here and do a
conversion yourself, be very carefull! Amazingly enough, If you load a 4
bitplane (16 color) icon into IconEdit on a 3 bitplane WB screen, and then
save it out, the fourth bitplane is NOT stipped off unless there is not a
single pixel that contains any of the upper eight colors. You won't be
able to tell if this is true, because if there are more colors in the image
than you have on your workbench, the image colors "wrap-around" to simply
repeat the first set. So you might have two blue pixels right next to each
other that are DIFFERENT colors; one might be color 4 (blue) and one might
be color 12 (also blue, since 12-8=4).
If the fourth bitplane is left intact, the new 8 color version will STILL
be 2000 bytes in size. The speed is the same as any other 8 color icon,
but why waste a disk block, right?
One way that I found to check for this is to change your WB to 16 colors
(temporarily... you'll see what I mean about slowdown), and change the
palette so that all of the upper 8 colors are something completely different
than your regular colorset (bright green works for me). Every pixel that is
still in the uper eight will be readily apparant. Change them all to the
color they are -supposed- to be and save the icon again.
Violß, la petite image!"
---<snip>---
Thanks, Eric!
I have found an excellent way of avoiding this "bitplane bug". Iconian 1.97▀
by Chad Randall, has a menu item, "Strip Planes" which strips this unwanted
data from low-colour icons. Select this just before saving and the extra
data will be removed.
Even better is the "opticon 1.5" package from Tobias Ferber
(opticon1.5.lha in the util/wb directory of Aminet) This effectively adds or
removes bitplanes from icons. Opticon is a C: command and will work on
existing icons without you having to load them into an Icon editor. There is
a nice batchfile called PatchIcons that will automatically go through all
the icons on a hard drive and strip unwanted bitplanes. I got almost 200Kb
back on my first pass of my SYS: hard drive! It seems that a lot of messy
icons are out there.
The PatchIcons batch file took a lot of tweaking before it worked for
me. (I have 2 hard drives and 4 partitions) It uses the opticon command
which must be in the C: directory.
The PatchIcon file read thus before I adjusted it:
---<snip>---
.key DIR
; $VER: PatchIcons as of Tue Feb 1 19:09:02 1994
; This is a script that kills all but the first 3 planes of the icons in
; the current (or the optionally given) directory and all it's
; subdirectories.
;
; (c)Copyright 1994 by Tobias Ferber
List DIR "<DIR>" ALL FILES PAT #?.info LFORMAT "OptIcon PLANES=3 NOEXPAND
*"%s%s*"" > RAM:lip3.<$$>
Execute RAM:lip3.<$$>
---<snip>---
Lines 10 and 11 of this script i.e. List DIR..., and %s%s*..., should be one
continuous line and not split up like this document. (77 columns wide)
Here's my version, straight from my S: directory.
---<snip>---
.key DIR
List DIR "<DIR>" ALL FILES PAT #?.info LFORMAT "OptIcon *"%s%s*" PLANES=2
NOEXPAND CRITICAL VERBOSE" > RAM:lip3.<$$>
Execute RAM:lip3.<$$>
---<snip>---
All that I have to do is type "PatchIcons <DIR>" in my Shell, where <DIR> is
the name of the harddrive/device that needs to be scanned. It reduces all
the icons to 2-bitplane versions. Nice! :-)
LICENCING AND COPYRIGHT:
This collection is FREEWARE! Seeing as I based most of the imagery on others
basic ideas, I feel that I cannot claim any copyright. A lot of the ideas
are my own but I reckon that if you like the icons, and want to use them on
your own WorkBench, then be my guest! I only ask that if you do decide to
use them, then I would appreciate it if you could drop me some e-mail,
postcards, telephone calls etc., to let me know that you like my work. (I
thrive on praise :-})
As for the legal stuff here goes:
All credit to all the authors/packages/progams mentioned. Quotations taken
from author's documentation, are copied verbatim. Credit/copyright is still
theirs.
BLATANT PLUG FOLLOWS:
I do have some other stuff on Aminet, BTW, should you be interested. Check
out the following.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Revenge of the Blob"
My personal interpretation of a classic Calvin & Hobbes cartoon. Done in
MovieSetter a la Eric Schwartz.
Found on Fish Disk 816 in the "Revenge" directory.
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"aidstoons"
Some cartoons of my own with the subject matter of the lighter side of AIDS.
Found in the pix/misc directory of AmiNet under the name of aidstoons.lha
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When Worlds Collide"
This is my present project. It isn't quite finished yet, but should be on
AmiNet in early July. This is a MovieSetter animation telling the story
of what really happened when the comet Shoemaker-Levy collided with Jupiter
in July last year.
It will be uploaded into the gfx/anim directory as most likely Worlds1.lha
and Worlds2.lha
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"MyIsoIcons02"
I have a number of icons that need my attention elsewhere on my hard drive.
Time constraints have limited me to this set, as I would like to get this
archive submitted to Aminet before the 15th April deadline for the Aminet
Gold CD # 6. Give me a month or two and MyIsoIcons02.lha will be uploaded.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Advertising plug now ceases...
CONTENTS OF THIS ARCHIVE:
Listing of archive 'myisoicons.lha':
Original Packed Ratio Date Time Name
-------- ------- ----- --------- -------- -------------
1115 581 47.8% 13-Apr-95 00:36:50 +MyIsoIcons.readme.info
1090 489 55.1% 13-Apr-95 00:36:50 +MyIsoIcons01.iff.info
1090 492 54.8% 13-Apr-95 00:36:50 +MyIsoIcons02.iff.info
1090 492 54.8% 13-Apr-95 00:36:50 +MyIsoIcons03.iff.info
1090 492 54.8% 13-Apr-95 00:36:50 +MyIsoIconsCLIPS.iff.info
91718 51835 43.4% 13-Apr-95 00:10:04 +16ColourWB.iff
23666 8709 63.2% 12-Apr-95 23:57:28 +NormalWB01.iff
1090 490 55.0% 13-Apr-95 00:34:16 +NormalWB03.iff.info
55566 32345 41.7% 19-Jan-95 21:25:44 +MyIsoIcons01.iff
67648 38882 42.5% 23-Mar-95 19:09:58 +MyIsoIcons02.iff
44738 25346 43.3% 12-Apr-95 23:46:18 +MyIsoIcons03.iff
1090 493 54.7% 13-Apr-95 00:34:16 +16ColourWB.iff.info
1090 492 54.8% 13-Apr-95 00:34:16 +NormalWB01.iff.info
44724 16031 64.1% 12-Apr-95 23:58:52 +NormalWB02.iff
1090 493 54.7% 13-Apr-95 00:34:16 +NormalWB02.iff.info
49738 21473 56.8% 13-Apr-95 00:00:42 +NormalWB03.iff
1140 456 60.0% 13-Apr-95 00:36:50 MyIsoIcons.info
1140 450 60.5% 13-Apr-95 00:36:50 +Grabs.info
13958 6277 55.0% 13-Apr-95 00:49:44 +MyIsoIcons.readme
34092 18607 45.4% 12-Apr-95 23:46:06 +MyIsoIconsCLIPS.iff
-------- ------- ----- --------- --------
437963 224925 48.6% 13-Apr-95 00:52:30 20 files
AND LASTLY:...
Commodore's liquidation is the best thing that could ever happen to the
Amiga! We are well rid of them!
It reminds me of a story that goes about a man that walks into a doctor's
surgery with a monkey sitting on his head. The doctor asks the man whether
he wants him to remove the monkey, as it seems that that is the problem.
The monkey retorts, "You should be talking to me, mate. I want you to remove
this growth from my a**hole!"
HOW TO CONTACT ME:
David Wiles:
E-MAIL: DW@ITU.SUN.AC.ZA
or: DW@MATIES.SUN.AC.ZA
SNAIL-MAIL: David Wiles
c/o B.M.D.E.
P.O. Box 19063
TYGERBERG 7505
South Africa
Phone: +21-938-9510 (W)
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