OS2 World Community Forum

OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical => Applications => Topic started by: David Graser on January 04, 2018, 06:15:16 pm

Title: Dynamic Icons
Post by: David Graser on January 04, 2018, 06:15:16 pm
This is a great feature that ArcaOS has implemented.  I checked and it was not in eCS.  Not only can one download and use PNGs off the internet or make your own, one can go to the "Display" setting in each folder's properties, select "Dynamic Icons", and then select the size that he or she wants.  Although it works with OS/2 icons, the real benefit comes when one uses PNGs.  ArcaOS comes with a directory called BigIcons that one can select PNGs from.  They are sized in 64x64, which is a nice size.

David
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: Martin Iturbide on January 04, 2018, 06:42:05 pm
Hi David.

I also consider it a nice feature, it is required for higher resolutions. I wrote this down about that because I forget things from time to time.
http://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/Increasing_Icon_Size_in_ArcaOS_5.0 (http://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/Increasing_Icon_Size_in_ArcaOS_5.0)

If I don't get it wrong that feature cames from the NeoWPS project, I remember that it was also available on eComStation with the name "BigIcon".

On my Santa's wishlist I hope that this component can be open sourced and merged together with XWorkplace. And also if someday it can replace the "icon" property of the WPS objects to don't have "Icon" and "Dynamic Icon" and just one.

Regards

Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: David Graser on January 04, 2018, 06:55:47 pm
A little off subject, but I think that ArcaOS could have been called "Looking Glass" and instead of calling folders folders, call them portals.  Instead of showing folders, have a round glass transparent window with an icon in it.  Always thinking.  One of those off the wall ideas I had. 
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: ak120 on January 04, 2018, 11:21:50 pm
This is a great feature that ArcaOS has implemented.  I checked and it was not in eCS.
In fact it's the same Russian shareware, just renamed, as Martin already mentioned.

Quote
Not only can one download and use PNGs off the internet or make your own, one can go to the "Display" setting in each folder's properties, select "Dynamic Icons", and then select the size that he or she wants.  Although it works with OS/2 icons, the real benefit comes when one uses PNGs.  ArcaOS comes with a directory called BigIcons that one can select PNGs from.  They are sized in 64x64, which is a nice size.
As long the folders only contain a small amount of PNG icons, it works to some degree. But everybody can make a simple calculation how it scales with a higher number. Each PNG file needs at least 32k of extra memory. In the end you will loose more features than you can win actually. Sizes of 64x64 pixel or higher were already available with OS/2 1.2 PM in 1989.

Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; otherwise, the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed; but new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: David Graser on January 05, 2018, 06:39:20 am
A little off subject, but I think that ArcaOS could have been called "Looking Glass" and instead of calling folders folders, call them portals.  Instead of showing folders, have a round glass transparent window with an icon in it.  Always thinking.  One of those off the wall ideas I had.

I did a proof of concept to see what it looked like.  I have attached the 2 pics.  The second one shows a folder (portal) open.  The open icon shows no picture because the folder icons are now showing.   I may continue to play with this for my desktop.

I believe I have found a bug.  Dynamic icons work fine when done on the desktop.  However, if you open a folder (portal), and try to do a dynamic icon from inside the folder, it does not work.  Open properties and it shows that it is there.  Close and the default icons always shows.  I tried this just for folders inside of folders.  This problem may hold true for program objects too.



Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: David Graser on January 05, 2018, 08:48:47 am
A little off subject, but I think that ArcaOS could have been called "Looking Glass" and instead of calling folders folders, call them portals.  Instead of showing folders, have a round glass transparent window with an icon in it.  Always thinking.  One of those off the wall ideas I had.

I believe I have found a bug.  Dynamic icons work fine when done on the desktop.  However, if you open a folder (portal), and try to do a dynamic icon from inside the folder, it does not work.  Open properties and it shows that it is there.  Close and the default icons always shows.  I tried this just for folders inside of folders.  This problem may hold true for program objects too.

I tested further.  Dynamic icons only work for the desktop icons.  No where else do they work.  The problems exist for both folders and program objects. 

Display > Dynamic icons > sizes works ok everywhere.  In other words, the icon resizing works fine.
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: Rich Walsh on January 05, 2018, 10:26:42 pm
I believe I have found a bug.  Dynamic icons work fine when done on the desktop.  However, if you open a folder (portal), and try to do a dynamic icon from inside the folder, it does not work.

David, Dynamic Icons is working as designed. What you take to be a bug is, sadly, a "known limitation" (i.e. it doesn't work because it isn't supposed to work, versus a bug where something should work but doesn't). In this case, the known limitation is which folder views it supports.

Based on your screen shots, it appears you were looking at an Xview window configured to display icons.  However, D.I. only supports the "classic" Icon view available from the 'Open as' menu. It does not support Xview in icon mode due to fundamental incompatibilities between the two that can not be remedied without a major redesign/rewrite of both.
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: David Graser on January 06, 2018, 01:49:36 am
Thanks Rich for enlightening me.  You were correct.   Did as you suggested and it works great.  I am working on making these new folders for my ArcaOS desktop.  I think it is looking good.  If I get enough portal folders done, I may upload them here for others to try.  Again thanks for all you do!

David
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: David Graser on January 06, 2018, 06:16:23 am
I have made progress on building my portal folders.  This will be my desktop once I am further along.  I have attached an updated picture of my progress so far.  I am doing this on a 12 inch notebook, so as always, I have no idea how they look on the big screen.

David
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: David Graser on January 06, 2018, 10:12:59 am
I decided that I have enough icons for people to play with.  Be sure to enable Dynamic Icons for each sub folder and choose the size you want.  Each folder icon will have to be manually replaced.  However, it does not take that long.

David
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: Sergey Posokhov on January 06, 2018, 10:54:29 am
I think it is looking good.
"Proof of Concepts" are really good and modern. They are much better than aggressive "eye candies" in eCS 2.x.
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: David Graser on January 07, 2018, 05:44:47 am
For those few brave souls that decided to download and give it a try, I attaching an updated pic with more portal folders made.  One thing I realized is that there needs to be some general folders; for folders that have no personalized made portal folder, a general utilities portal, and general information portals.  In the new pic, you will see the new generalized portal for those folders that don't have their own portal icons.

There are advantages to this concept.  Usually with every new release of each version of OS/2, the folder icons are changed.  This is a tremendous amount of work.   With the template, portals can be easily updated.  It is also so much faster because one is not trying to fit another large icon in with the folder icon.  I find  lot of the new folder icons just blend too much together.

Anyway, the dynamic icon feature is great.  Thank to all the planners and developers that made this happen!  I am excited about my new desktop as it develops.

I see no loss of performance on my ArcaOS system using these PNGs.

David


Anyway, I am happy with my desktop.  I will continue to make more portals and then I may start on updating some of the icons again. 


Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: Dave Yeo on January 07, 2018, 08:27:12 am
Looks good.
About performance, I think the problem is actually losing address space in the lower arena causing programs to fail quicker. This could be tested with Theseus by measuring memory with and without the dynamic icons.
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: David Graser on January 07, 2018, 10:47:10 am
I have  updated, renamed, and attached my Portal Folders. I would discard the previous zip.  This one contains way more and the icons are named in a more logical order.

I have used PNGs primarily for the folders, although I do have a few PNG icons.  If someone needs a portal folder made for one of their programs, let me know and I will try to make one.

I am now looking at the desktop backgrounds.  I do believe most should be removed and put in the garbage.  I have a few I will upload in a few days for people to try and use if they so chose.  Anything is better than most of what is in the OS2\Bitmap directory.

File is too large.  Will try again later today after I have had some sleep.

David
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: David Graser on January 08, 2018, 01:55:24 am
Broke Portal_Folder icons into two zip files.

The first
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: David Graser on January 08, 2018, 01:56:41 am
The second
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: David Graser on January 10, 2018, 07:38:47 am
I am working on "clear glass Portals."  What is interesting is that you can use both.  Say you like the blue portals for the desktop, but the clear glass portals for the opened portals with the white background or vice versa.  I am also adding to the Blue Portals.  It is going to be slower going.  Work is getting to be more demanding.

David
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: David Graser on January 10, 2018, 06:26:19 pm
Looks good.
About performance, I think the problem is actually losing address space in the lower arena causing programs to fail quicker. This could be tested with Theseus by measuring memory with and without the dynamic icons.

Hi Dave

Being a non programmer, I may have thought this out to the wrong conclusion.  This would would be true for the more portals one opens.  Does ArcaOS load all the portals (folders) into memory on boot-up or does it load into memory only those portals that are open?  If the latter is true, then one would probably have to open many portals before the lower memory is exhausted.  There again, it may depend on how much memory one has installed on their computer. One can see in some of my uploaded pics that I have quite a few portals open without any degradation.  Is my non programming analysis wrong? 
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: Dave Yeo on January 10, 2018, 08:53:03 pm
I'm not sure how the WPS allocates the memory, whether as icons are opened or all at once. Hopefully as icons are opened and it is released when the icons are closed.
About the memory, or at least my imperfect understanding. On OS/2 systems before 4.5 (earlier with Warp Server), processes only get 512 MBs of shared address space, minus whatever DLLs are loaded and memory they use. eg Right now on a freshly booted system with SeaMonkey running, I seem to have 230 MBs of free lower shared memory. Making it even more complex is that the memory can be fragmented, program requests a bunch of 10MB chunks and then frees up every second one leaving a bunch of 10MB holes. Another program wants to allocate a 20MB chunk and fails even though there is lots of free memory.
Latest versions of OS/2 ca also use high memory if compiled to. So things like Mozilla mostly allocate high memory. Unluckily some of the OS/2 API (old 16 bit stuff) can only access low memory so a big memory hog like Firefox mostly uses high memory and even the DLLs themselves can be loaded high but still needs some low memory and when high memory gets full/fragmented falls back on low memory.
And understand we're talking virtual memory, not physical memory.
My description above might not be quite right but that is the general idea, namely that low memory is a scarce resource on OS/2.
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: David Graser on January 11, 2018, 07:07:41 am
This is a preview of the Clear folder portals.  I now refer to my desktop as ArcaOS Dimensions.  By uploading, I can see what they look like on a different bigger screen computer.
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: David Graser on January 12, 2018, 05:41:15 am
I just finished my clear portal folders,  I have broke it into two zip files.

The first attachment
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: David Graser on January 12, 2018, 05:42:25 am
Clear portal folders

The second attachment
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: Martin Iturbide on January 12, 2018, 09:23:57 pm
Hi David.

Thanks for sharing, nice icons.

I have a question. Do you have any documentation that you have generated about how many icons do you consider that became a "theme" for the OS ? I always wanted to generate some documentation about it and I'm trying to do something on the OS2World wiki. (http://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/Operating_Systems_Icons)  It still requires a lot of work, but I'm trying to find the formal name (objectID name) of each icon for a theme.

Regards
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: David Graser on January 13, 2018, 03:20:36 am
Hi Martin

Not right off hand.  The Russian eSchemes packages should give one a good idea of most of the folder and icon replacements they thought necessary.  I played around and developed a bunch of schemes (for better or worst) years back.  I will have to look in one of my icon scheme development folders to count the number of icons they considered important provided I can find one.

David
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: David Graser on January 13, 2018, 03:59:05 am
I counted in the neighborhood of 227 icons.  Each icon was asigned a number.  I have a pic attached.
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: David Graser on January 13, 2018, 06:03:28 am
I have attached a few more Blue portal icons.

David
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: Martin Iturbide on January 14, 2018, 04:52:25 pm
I counted in the neighborhood of 227 icons.  Each icon was asigned a number.  I have a pic attached.

Hi David.

Did you generated that list by yourself? Do you have documented which number matchs the object in the desktop? I'm just thinking about it to see if there is an easy way to create icon themes and assign them with some common name to know which icon should be assigned to which object.

Regards
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: David Graser on January 15, 2018, 10:32:25 am
Martin

I have to apologize.  I was getting eschemes mixed up with the icon toolkit.  Like I said, it has been around 5 years or longer since I last messed with either one.  A lot has been forgotten.  The html from the toolket does an excellent job describing what what needs to be done, which I have attached.  Be sure and read the credits at the bottom of the page.

David
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: Alex Taylor on January 16, 2018, 04:15:21 am
FWIW, that is an ancient and quite obsolete version of the HOWTO. The latest HOWTO and toolkit was version 2.1 released in December 2011.
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: Lars on January 16, 2018, 12:36:08 pm
FWIW, that is an ancient and quite obsolete version of the HOWTO. The latest HOWTO and toolkit was version 2.1 released in December 2011.

Alex, what happens if you run "rebuild new themes" from the Theme applet ? Will it bind the resource files (create by rc with the -r switch) to the DLLs in question ? In short: will that also lead to a selection of a specific theme ? Will this change be applied on next system start ? Or will it even be applied immediately ?

Thanks for any help. Lars
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: Martin Iturbide on January 16, 2018, 01:53:19 pm
Hi

Is there a way to download the "Icon Theme Toolkit v2.1" ? I was not able to find it on hobbes or on Alex's homepage.

Regards
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: Alex Taylor on January 16, 2018, 03:48:40 pm
Alex, what happens if you run "rebuild new themes" from the Theme applet ? Will it bind the resource files (create by rc with the -r switch) to the DLLs in question ? In short: will that also lead to a selection of a specific theme ? Will this change be applied on next system start ? Or will it even be applied immediately ?

Only the ancient version 1.x of Icon Themes had that feature. I don't even remember how it worked, but  IIRC it simply builds the resource files, it doesn't install them.
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: Alex Taylor on January 16, 2018, 04:15:35 pm
Hi

Is there a way to download the "Icon Theme Toolkit v2.1" ? I was not able to find it on hobbes or on Alex's homepage.

Regards

I believe it lived on the eCS BetaZone.

I have it here, but I'd rather not upload it until I can review it for any necessary updates for the current Icon Themes version.
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: Martin Iturbide on January 16, 2018, 06:28:56 pm
I believe it lived on the eCS BetaZone.

I have it here, but I'd rather not upload it until I can review it for any necessary updates for the current Icon Themes version.

Thanks Alex, please let me know when you release it on your website.

Regards
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: Alex Taylor on January 18, 2018, 02:55:35 pm
http://www.altsan.org/programming/os2/index.html#itheme
I have it here, but I'd rather not upload it until I can review it for any necessary updates for the current Icon Themes version.

Thanks Alex, please let me know when you release it on your website.


OK, it's up now, along with the latest version of Icon Themes itself.
http://www.altsan.org/programming/os2/index.html#itheme

It's been updated to support all the icons supported by the current ITheme, but created themes should still work fine with any 2.x version.
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: David Graser on January 19, 2018, 08:15:16 am
Here is one of the many themes I made years ago.  Works good with eCS.  This is the red folder theme.  I also have it in black and yellow.  I also have smoke and purple glass folders themes and others.  All folders are based on Linux folders.  I have attached one if anyone wants to try.  I had problems running these themes on ArcaOS.  Done in wpi so they can be removed.  Before installing, it is a good idea to back up the desktop.

Start the wpi and see a screen shot.  Can always cancel the install afterwards.
Title: Re: Dynamic Icons
Post by: Martin Iturbide on January 20, 2018, 01:45:40 pm
Hi.

I also like to have the System Setup icons matching. I did this ones that are still far away from perfect or complete, but gaves a general idea.

Regards