[Fonzie]

Hi,

I was thinking, as always, wouldn't it be cool if selected icons in OS X would glow ? If you have ever seen GlowIcons on the Amiga you would know what it is. Maybe the glow-color could be chosen by the user.

[rhythmicmoose]

Sounds better than the goofy Panther selection box. I still prefer the old Jag way though.

[Komisar]

I don't really get waht your saying but bombia is working on the dark day set which will have a glowing sence to it

[idle]

Originally posted by Komisar:
I don't really get waht your saying but bombia is working on the dark day set which will have a glowing sence to it

well, its quite clearly stated in the first post, isn't it? i mean if you select an icon it would glow or have a halo instead of the bezel-like box around the icon... (panther) i'm not sure about this idea. for certain themes it would surely be a funky addition.

[Adam Betts]

Originally posted by rhythmicmoose:
Sounds better than the goofy Panther selection box.

It does sound better and could feel right but it will never be clean and simple. It'll look really, really crappy on icons with heavy uses of Alpha Channel (glow around the shadow area = ugly) and not to mention that it'll be CPU-hogging (lot of calculation needed just for one mask file). Imagine if you select more than hundred icons in desktop... Beachballin' Speed issues could be solved by storing info in cache but Finder will become even more unstable. Majority of the crashes in Finder was caused by corrupted cache files and we don't need more.

For now, Panther's Box Selection is the only great design that doesn't touch or adjust the icon. Personally, I like it tons more than Icon Highlight and most Icon Select State design on different platforms.

[Fonzie]

It was only a fragment of my imagination with this glowing idea. But it would probably cause alot of beachball'ing. Also the Amiga Glowicons only has 16 or 32 colors so that is probablty why things are sped up. Also the glow is included in the selected state of the icon.

It's sorta hardcoded in the icon. Glowicons is just another variant of icons for the Amiga computer.

This just shows how much I miss the little bugger LOL - OS X has some of the same feeling though, so i'm not far off.

Thank you for commenting.

edit. but the glow could be turned off for bigger icons when selecting a hundred or more icons? I don't think many people has 128x128 size icons in their folders except maybe "Pictures" but then it can be turned off and only be used for smaller size icons. I dunno really. I just think it looks funky, haha.

[Ji Eun]

For those on XP as well as OSX, there is an app called AveDesk (www.avedesk.com) written by a clever Dutch friend of mine that enables all kinds of desktop icon effects such as:
mouseover = glowing /pulsating icons (up to 256 i believe)
or mouseover --> full color icon transitions to greyscalse
or mouseover on icon pre-set to greyscale --> icon transitions to full color (very nice in graphite / dark-themed environments)
The app also offers vertical text labels (handy for asian text / fonts), snap to grid options, auto-arrange options, a vast supply of supported desklets such as system and network monitoring, etc and other functional and sweet eyecandy which i forget at the moment.

Anyway, the point was not so much to promote AveDesk, but to illustrate that when properly coded, glowing icons don't cause any hangups or lags whatsoever in XP (AveDesk is absurdly resource-friendly), so certainly the same efffect(s) should play well in OSX as well.

[Mac Guru]

Where's the OS X version??? All that's on that site is a Windows EXE

[Ji Eun]

whoops, a little miscommunication there, avedesk is unfortunately *not* available for OSX at this time. it's strictly a PC app.

ironically, part of the reason for avedesk's existence was to emulate panther's desktop icon effects such as color labels, showing folder contents, large icons, etc. later, as the app matured, it eventually 'out-Panthered' Pather.

the reason for my earlier post was just to say that if windows-based developers have found a way to offer glowing icons with 3rd party apps and no major memory hit, then i assume osx could handle the same thing as gracefully if not more so.