[sugar] icon assistance/validation

[Gary C Martin]

On 18 Mar 2008, at 14:40, Eben Eliason wrote:

> Perhaps we could even remove "strokes in the fill color" from the
> ruleset, as I don't believe I myself nor anyone else thus far has used
> them.

If I understand your description here, I'm pretty sure I'm using them  
to get crisp icon detail within the current design constraints – the  
effect in the home ring was particularly poor without, if I remember  
correctly (no doubt some other hack to get a strobe** working there):

	http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=activities/moon;a=tree;f=activity

And I must admit I have the same concerns as Bert about using alpha on  
the vector artwork, I've seen a bunch folks do this in Flash UI's and  
effects, and they usually look like s#@t on a stick.

** Much as I like a SMOOTH strobe effect, the XO as I understand it is  
really poor at transparency processing (HW can support it, but like so  
many things, the SW support isn't there yet). So it's slow to the  
point that the strobe effect had to be dialled down to the current  
jerky flick book effect, making the machine look even slower (though  
activities do launch slightly faster for the change). Is there perhaps  
a more efficient, less hacky way to provide a 'launching' visual  
metaphor (at least until sugar gets HW transparency and a compositing  
API). Is a simple blinking effect at 1 or 2Htz between un-launched and  
launched colours a possibility? Or is that too much like a potential  
activity attention/notification type effect (say a person joins a non- 
front chat session, or someone takes a new photo in a non-front shared  
record session)?

> In that case, would you mind testing it out a bit (even should you
> remain one who wants to create them by hand in the future), just so I
> can get some practical feedback on the performance, robustness, and
> usability of the tool?  Thanks!


I'll also take a look at some point, though so far I prefer hand  
coding these simple shapes given the design spec. I used to be a fan  
of Illustrator but it's just too expensive to justify unless you're a  
heavy user, and Inkscape is feature rich but is borderline too clunky  
and lumbering to work with.

I'm sure I spotted, in some dusty part of the wiki, someone writing a  
simple SVG drawing activity – at the time I thought it was to aid  
drawing shapes for activity icons, but I may have misread. Any one  
know the status of it?

G