Re: ICNS as default format

[Gregory Casamento]

Eric,

Indeed, I did say that tiff would be acceptable as well.   In fact,
one strike against ICNS is that no applications currently support
writing it.   I could add a "ICNS Editor" to GAP or GNUstep, but
that's not the highest thing on my priority list at the moment.

I still have to get the release of GORM and the GNOME theme out.
Unfortunately, time has been short as of late with many obligations on
the work front.

GC

On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 10:57 AM, Eric Wasylishen <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Gregory,
>
>> The proposed benefit is the same benefit that Mac OS X sees from using
>> the ICNS format.   Icons and other graphics will look better at larger
>> sizes because the optimal version of the icon should be chosen by
>> GNUstep for display instead of zooming the image.   TIFF is also an
>> acceptable solution since it can handle multiple versions in one file,
>> I'm not sure if our code currently supports pulling out different
>> representations from TIFF files.
>
> It supports that - in fact, you can see it in action if you try setting
> the GSScaleFactor default to 2 - various interface images (menu arrows, 
> dimples,
> scroller arrows) will switch to using a higher-resolution representation from
> the TIFF. I guess I need to promote this more ;-)
>
> So, I don't think there is any technical reason to switch to ICNS over TIFF
> because once the representations are loaded by NSImage, it should make no
> difference which format they came from.
>
> I agree we want to support choosing optimal icon sizes based on the size
> they are to be displayed in, like you get when displaying an ICNS in
> an NSImageView on Cocoa - but implementing this should be orthogonal
> to the details of whether the image is TIFF or ICNS. I wrote some more on this
> topic in the "NSImage and ICNS" thread.
>
> Cheers,
> Eric



-- 
Gregory Casamento - GNUstep Lead/Principal Consultant, OLC, Inc.
yahoo/skype: greg_casamento, aol: gjcasa
(240)274-9630 (Cell)