The Next Gen Of Icons!

So GNOME 2.4 is the first GUI to use SVG icons. The big thing with SVG is:

1. Its open/patent free

2. It allows remarkable icon scaling compared to ANY other format.

Here's a screenshot of it:

http://screenshots.haque.net/screenshots/v...enshot-5854.png

This absolutly amazed me.

The image on the left is a high quality PNG, and the right is the SVG.

I hope MS and Apple use these formats.

C'mon, does anyone else find this cool?

KDE should have SVG images in 3.2. (wow, GNOME finally beat them to something :lol: )

#55276

wow that is awesome!

gnome 2.4 is sounding great everyday!

i love gnome!

thanks for the info contra!

-bolero

#55280

whoa, cool! ms definitely must use this!!

#55281

Wow that is quite amazing, hard to imagine they're the same 'size' ... there's such a huge difference!

#55283

uh.... SVG is a vector format... this means u can scale it UNLIMITEDLY.... original size doesn't matter on vectors. SVG is like Flash movies. u can view it at any size. but this comes at a larger processing cost.

#55288

but since icons are pretty much static, it won't be too big of a performance drop, right?

#55289

Originally posted by Menge@Sep 13 2003, 12:00 PM
uh.... SVG is a vector format... this means u can scale it UNLIMITEDLY.... original size doesn't matter on vectors. SVG is like Flash movies. u can view it at any size. but this comes at a larger processing cost.

Hmmm....I dont know much about it,so you are probobly right.

I thought I read somewhere though that the quality starts to get worse after a certain point.

And in GNOME, you can only scale it to the width Ive shown in the pic. If its unlimited scaling, why wouldn't GNOME allow larger scales?

dreamz: When I was scaling it, it was pretty instant.

#55294

and since vector images only use flat colors .. those cool aqua icons ( or any icons that depend on pixel shading ) we see will be quite hard to implement ...

#55295

the problemw ith vector icons is that the shapes have to remain fairly simple. Examine the two icons carefuly and youl notice that the house doesnt have any smothe sexy transitions.

#55296

I dont know, the rest of the icon theme has some nice shadows and stuff.

It does look kind of 2D though, but that could be by design.

And on Alpha blending, XFree86 doesnt have that anyway, so it being SVG isnt the problem.

#55298

Originally posted by lostspyder@Sep 13 2003, 05:47 PM
the problemw ith vector icons is that the shapes have to remain fairly simple. Examine the two icons carefuly and youl notice that the house doesnt have any smothe sexy transitions.

Hum That´s not completely true. It´s possible to make realistic icons with vector applications. Take a look at the messenger icon.The main problem with SVG and other vector formats (like flash) is that they offer diferent ways/features to work that SVG cannot support directly. It will depends mainly on how aplications will export the work to the SVG format.

The main advantage of SVG is resolution free work and small sizes, althought a little more processing when rescaling for bigger sizes depending on the complexity of the work/effects used (gradients/transparency/blends).