Re: Allowing users to choose their own icons

Hi,

Please allow me to wander a little bit on the topic.

IMHO icons should be accessed using a symbolic name. That allows you to 
change the whole set of icons without changing the code. I blogged about 
this some time ago:

http://www.antonioshome.net/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=20

It seems to me that NetBeans APIs have a single way of retrieving icons, 
by using Utilities.loadImage. That's then a good place to *implement* a 
method that retrieves icons using symbolic names.

You could even define an icon-specific URL to retrieve icons, a URL that 
specifies a size and/or a combination of icons, like this:

icon://small/filesystems/file+badge/unsaved

Regarding KDE and Gnome icon sets, the problem there is that each Linux 
distribution has its own icon-naming standards, so you'll have to map 
symbolic icon names to *distribution-specific* icon names.

Just my 0,02€.

Cheers,
Antonio





NetBeans icon themes should be packed within a single file.

Ivan Soleimanipour escribió:
> Stepan, others ..
> We need a bit of advice.
> 
> With all the new icons that sunstudio dbxgui got I decided to do some
> housecleaning and remove all the old icons we've been keeping
> since sunstudio10 from our resources directory.
> 
> Jean then pointed out that we used to collect them and present them in
> a menu in the CreateNewDbxButton action. And now that menu has become
> pretty small.
> 
> I pointed our that they were all rather useless and of the wrong
> style and that I don't want to carry old junky icons around in
> our jar file.
> She pointed out that most of our users will be satisfied with something ..
> anything. They don't want to create their own icons or go searching
> through KDE or gnome icon repositories which have mountains of
> interesting icons.
> 
> What to do?
> 
> Does NB have a built in icon editor yet we can point to?
> 
> On some linux systems (or is it KDE systems) there is a /usr/icons
> directory and we could have the icon browser start from there but I
> don't know how prevalent /usr/icons is on other systems.
> There's certainly no such thing on solarises and I can't even find where 
> all the gnome stuff is on solarises much less gnomes generic 
> icon repository.
> 
> Does Java or NB have a collection of "generic" icons we could point to?
> 
> Ideally I wish there was a icon "composer" which wasn't pixel based
> but allowed you to build icons from a bunch of primtivies and badges ...