[ksloan2]

This just hit me today, and I was scrambling for a forum to post it on to get some feedback... and I guess since I'm an OS X user now, I'll post it here!

So, I was thinking, we have gone from small 32x32 monochromatic icons to 128x128 fully alpha blended icons, build from pixels. Now, some Linux desktops have moved on to object based icons (scalable "vector" graphics, SVG) which is nice, because the same icon takes a lot less space and can be rendered in any size.

But what is the next step?

Which got me thinking, what if icons would rotate when you hover the mouse over them, or fully animate when you click them. Or what if the cursor was a light source and icons gleamed and reflected light and their (desktop) surroundings properly? What if icons were all textured polygons, pixel shaded and had skeletal animation?

Is there a system like that out there, and also, do you think this is a good idea?

Personally, I'm currently in love with the idea, though it's about five minutes old in my brain right now, and probably hasn't really settled yet. I also thought some about how to create those icons. Maya? Yikes, that's kinda expensive and complicated. I've tried Zbrush and Blender as well, but could never really get my grips around 3D. In my opinion, being a 2D artist is an art, while being a 3D artist is more engineering.

But anyway, opinions, please!

[kick52]

wow, that sounds like a pretty cool idea. the actual 3d object thing wouldnt be that hard to do, but to integrate it into finder or whatever could not be done by any third party mac proggers. unless someone came up with an extreme hack.

i would pay lots for a hack like that.


edit: it would be cool as well if you could program that icon, so you could have icons that are basicly prgorams (like a clock on your desktop) and icons can be bigger than other icons so you could have icon games and menus for accessing apps, you could have one with a rotating cube which has the time temp and rss feeds and you could click on it to change the side if you couldnt wait for it to rotate.

this idea is pretty cool and expandable.

[tooki]

Vector icons (2D or 3D) naïvely ignore the realities of bitmap rasterization and human symbol recognition. The fact that Linux is using them simply underlines the Open Source community's obliviousness to usability issues. It's also not necessarily true that vector saves space over bitmap: for images that will be output at small resolutions, vector is often less efficient.

And remember that they are called icons for a reason: they are supposed to be a representation of their referent, not a facsimile of it. To be useful, they have to be stylized.

Here's what I wrote on the subject back in October in a thread about 10.5:

Originally Posted by Jaw3000

... I think Apple should make icons vector

Not a good idea. Vector icons means you get exactly one version of the icon for all sizes. In fact, that just doesn't work. For example, every document icon uses the same shape -- the dogeared page. If you simply shrink them down, the identifying marks within the icon simply mush together. That's why long ago, they figured out that it's critical to have different hand-crafted versions of the icon for different sizes. Look at the Adobe PDF file icon: at 16px, it has just a red bar and the Acrobat triple-curl centered on it. At larger sizes, the triple-curl is off-center, with the Adobe name under it, and the red bar says PDF in it.

The Eudora application icon is another great example: the 16px version is entirely different from all the larger ones, and the 32px, 48px, and 128px versions are all slightly different drawings (e.g. the pencil moves around, the little stylized people change in height). In other words, they're not just larger and smaller versions of the same icon.

Look at the icon for a simple TextEdit text file in OS X: as you scale it, the number of words on the lines (and the number of lines) increases as the icon gets bigger. If you were to take the biggest icon and shrink it, you'd see only a gray blob in the center. With such custom icons, you see the lines at every size.

An example of a bad icon is Fetch 4.0: it uses one icon for all sizes. It looks great at 128px, but by the time it's scaled down to 16px, you can't make out what it is at all. A hand-optimized version of the icon, or a different one for that size, would have been much better.


Note that Apple's design suggestions for icon design have great advice: design the icon at the smallest size to be clear at that size, and then blow it up to bigger sizes (adding detail as you go along). You get much better results by starting simple and adding detail as you get bigger than by starting with a detailed large icon and then shrinking down.

tooki

tooki

[R0CK3TM4NN]

I think animated icons on the desktop would be very distracting.

[tooki]

We'd just learn to tune them out, just like banner ads.

tooki

[eevyl]

There was an extension for Mac OS 9 and earlier to have animated icons. Was a fun toy, but not much more.

[Hal06]

Such vector icons have been available under my old SGIs for ages. Icons also used to vary when you click them.

[CharlesS]

Hell no, it's impossible enough to make icons for OS X that don't look like crap already.

[ksloan2]

Originally Posted by tooki

Here's what I wrote on the subject back in October in a thread about 10.5:

Good post, except that it doesn't apply to 3D icons. For the last, I don't know 10 years, there have been an optimization technique in the 3D world which is essentially what using a different image for 16x16 sized icons is: LOD. 3D icons creators could provide this, or skip it, because there are algorithms for automatically producing different level of detail models these days.

Originally Posted by Inside Man

Such vector icons have been available under my old SGIs for ages. Icons also used to vary when you click them.

They have? And you mean 3D vectors now, not 2D? Really cool, do you know the system name or what I should Google for?

[tooki]

Originally Posted by eobet

Good post, except that it doesn't apply to 3D icons. For the last, I don't know 10 years, there have been an optimization technique in the 3D world which is essentially what using a different image for 16x16 sized icons is: LOD. 3D icons creators could provide this, or skip it, because there are algorithms for automatically producing different level of detail models these days.

I don't for a second believe that a computer can create a functional reduced-detail icon. I am aware of LOD in gaming, but I don't believe it applies to icons because good icons aren't realistic. They are deliberately abstracted, and the smaller you go, the more abstracted they must be. Aside from the fact that 3D icons are, IMHO, a bad idea since the same icon may look different at different times (thus negating most of the value of an icon at all!), you'd basically need to have the designer make multiple versions of the icon for different sizes. Certainly there is no way to justify the effort in both implementing 3D icons in the OS and in requiring developers to create them: the result would likely be reduced usability.

I am not saying that 3D icons are always out of place: in a 3D app, they might be useful. Or once computers have 3D displays.

But for now, computers are best served with several sizes of hand-designed, optimized-for-each-size bitmaps, and perhaps a vector drawing of the largest size, should the icon need to be scaled up further.

tooki

[Horsepoo!!!]

User interface illiterates shouldn't be allowed to start threads about user interface 'improvements'.

That said...tooki has done an excellent job explaining what an icon is and why adding more complexities to them is *not* a Good Thing™.

[mdc]

Originally Posted by kick52

edit: it would be cool as well if you could program that icon, so you could have icons that are basicly prgorams (like a clock on your desktop) and icons can be bigger than other icons so you could have icon games and menus for accessing apps, you could have one with a rotating cube which has the time temp and rss feeds and you could click on it to change the side if you couldnt wait for it to rotate.

this idea is pretty cool and expandable.

You pretty much just described Dashboard.

[olePigeon]

Vector can be used just fine, there's nothing keeping the icon from rendering differently at different sizes. Once the icon hits 32x32 pixels, you can use one version. At 16x16, you can use a different one. No different than the bitmap icons. It's just that at 48 pixels and bigger, it'd look great.

Vector would be exceptionally useful for a user interface. It'd be resolution independent. You could keep consistency (if you wanted) of the user interface regardless of what resolution you set your monitor at.

This could be really handy for people in video and design. The interface would be "rendered" at 1024x768 (not too small), but you'd have the screen realestate of 2048x1600. That way you can work on files at a very large resolution while keeping the interface legible.

[Salty]

I could understand using Vectors for icons. I can't understand why you would want to go to all the hassle of having 3D icons. I mean sure Apple's made icons look pretty dang cool and I make my own all the time. That said I don't want to have to fool with Maya all the time to make icons I like. In fact typically I don't like a lot of Apple's default finder icons. I think the default folder icon looks lame. Does it look like a folder? Sure but it's got no oomph!

[Hal06]

Originally Posted by eobet

They have? And you mean 3D vectors now, not 2D? Really cool, do you know the system name or what I should Google for?

Oh sorry, I had to clarify that even using vectors they are 2D, nevertheless, they look like some System 7 icons, old school alike, don't expect IRIX looking cool, it has the average unix look from the 90s, so I guess everyone used to the cute Mac OS face is going to clarim IRIX looks like sh*t

Just try an "IRIX screenshot" search with google images and you would get a good number of picts.

[ghporter]

Glenn's opinion here:

When you get down to the 16X16 micro-icon world, how are you going to render the kind of detail needed to make a vector image usable? Vector graphics tend to have a minimum effective display size; below that they get all muddy and smudged because the display tries to show all the vectors (all that its logic allows at small sizes, anyway). 32X32 pixels is pretty tight for any graphic, and since vector images tend to be "rich," they lose image effectiveness when rendered at very small sizes.

To be useful, such vector, 3D icons would have to be able to recognize the physical resolution of the display (the actual pixel-by-pixel count) and alter themselves to be readable at reduced sizes. Maybe "readable" is the wrong word. Maybe "recognizable" is better. In any case, this would add logic to the icon, changing it from a simple graphic in a simple format to something much more complex. And that doesn't guarantee that the result WILL be readable. It just says it'll be different. How is that better than bitmaps?

[tooki]

Consider the almost analogous case of fonts: until anti-aliasing came along (which some people do not consider an improvement), fonts came in two types: bitmap and vector. The hand-tweaked bitmap fonts invariably were easier to read than the vector font at the same size. To make the vector fonts render legibly at small sizes, we had to resort to "hinting", that is, adding extra information to the font to tell it what to do at smaller sizes. Hinting is an extremely labor-intensive and expensive process, and it's part of what differentiates good fonts (like Adobe's or Bitstream's) from freeware fonts or the "20,000 fonts on one DVD!" for $14.95 from CompUSA's bargain bin.

In the end, the hinted vector fonts usually ended up bigger than the bitmaps. You kept both so that the bitmap fonts would be used on-screen, and the vector for paper output.

Bitmap fonts also take massively less CPU time to display. Vector fonts must be rendered before being displayed. Bitmaps are simply loaded into memory, ready to go.

Devices that don't need print output, like PDAs and cellphones, simply use bitmap fonts.

Basically everything that applies to fonts applies to icons.

The upshot is, vector icons would a) be less recognizable, b) require massive work beyond what's done now (hinting, multiple versions, etc), c) likely consume more hard disk space, d) take much more CPU time to display (and the more complex the icon, the longer it'd take), and all this for no tangible benefit to the user or developer.

The current solution, of having bitmaps at multiple sizes (using smooth bicubic interpolation for intermediate sizes) works very well to the user, is computationally cheap, and is easy for the developer. At most, one vector version of the largest size could be added for special applications like FrontRow, though a big bitmap would be computationally cheaper.

I'd suggest to people, before continuing in this discussion, to follow the link in my post above to the old thread, and read all the responses, since that post caused, er, lively discussion there.

took

[kick52]

Originally Posted by mdc

You pretty much just described Dashboard.

yea, i know what dashboard is and i suppose my idea was alot like it but, say you have an icon for a game, you could have a high score counter for the game or whaterver. that would be pretty good for internet games.

also, for Macintosh HD, you could have a free space reader or the drive ould be animated for when its loading. (seeing how HDs are so quiet nowadays)

[ksloan2]

I'm still not convinced that it's impossible to render clear 32x32 and below fully 3D icons. I mean, I create vector icons for 16x16 with no problem, though granted, I build them at that size as well. I use Xara X, but even Illustrator can specify its units in pixels and position them exactly. If you wish, click here for a sneak peek at my work. So, since Xara X is quite a clever program and allows me to do this, why couldn't there be a 3D modelling application which allowed me to do this as well? And again, using LOD models, you could have one model for resolutions 16 and 32 and one hi-def model for everything above that. Perhaps in 10 years time, 16x16 icons won't even be necessary because we'd either run at such high resolutions that it would be terribly tiny, or I don't know, we'd project the image directly onto the retina or something.

On a similar note, since the OS X desktop is OpenGL accelerated, couldn't OpenGL be used to render SVG icons terribly fast? But I admit that it's probably a waste, since rendering them in software once, and them putting the output on a texture is probably much more efficient.

Originally Posted by Horsepoo!!!

User interface illiterates shouldn't be allowed to start threads about user interface 'improvements'.

That said...tooki has done an excellent job explaining what an icon is and why adding more complexities to them is *not* a Good Thing™.

Your post added exactly 0% more information to this thread. The only thing it did was expose you as a jerk, so to avoid that in the future, please keep your insults to yourself. For your information, I have studied human computer interaction at college and did my degree project in that subject. Nowhere do I say that having 3D icons would be an improvement. I did this thread specifically do debate the feasability and other interesting aspects of this technology.

[Horsepoo!!!]

Originally Posted by eobet

Your post added exactly 0% more information to this thread. The only thing it did was expose you as a jerk, so to avoid that in the future, please keep your insults to yourself. For your information, I have studied human computer interaction at college and did my degree project in that subject. Nowhere do I say that having 3D icons would be an improvement. I did this thread specifically do debate the feasability and other interesting aspects of this technology.

Boo hoo hoo.

Oh...everyone already knows I'm jerk...so I wasn't exactly exposed.

Please share with us your knowledge of human/computer interaction. No offense but so far we've seen nothing...I gotta tell it like it is because I'd be lying if I told you that you seemed knowledgeable about the subject. If you feel insulted about this whole thing, I may not be so far from the truth.

[SSharon]

Originally Posted by Vader

I think animated icons on the desktop would be very distracting.

See you would think so but for a while I used an app to make my screen saver my desktop background. Oh, and I was using the aquarium screen saver so there were fish swimming around my icons.

Although I am serius that I really had that set up for a while, I would never use animated icons. What if the AOL icon rotated to by coca cola ever other minute?

[tooki]

Originally Posted by eobet

I'm still not convinced that it's impossible to render clear 32x32 and below fully 3D icons. I mean, I create vector icons for 16x16 with no problem, though granted, I build them at that size as well. I use Xara X, but even Illustrator can specify its units in pixels and position them exactly. If you wish, click here for a sneak peek at my work.

Those icons, to me, seem much too "busy" and muddy for that size. Icons with that few pixels basically can't afford to have antialiasing, because that blurs everything. At that size, blur is bad.

tooki

[ksloan2]

I usually restrict myself to two symbols per icon, but sometimes I have to use three but that is my absolute maximum. Ehm, the icons are muddy because it's not only a poorly compress jpg file, but I also put a pattern over the entire image so people can't steal them as that is commercial stuff.

Here, I made an example for you. It's original size, blown up pixels and zoomed views, no compression, no watermarks. As you can see, modern applications allow exact positioning of lines so you can choose where they are blurry (decimal positioning) and where they aren't (integer positioning). I'm especially pleased with the eye, which is even visible at just 10 pixels wide!

Now, the outline does grow out of proportion when you zoom, and in Xara X, I don't know how to fix that (perhaps InkScape and SVG can do it), but I do know that in 3D, you can tell a line to always be a line, which means that it's always 1 pixel thick regardless of zoom level.

Finally, regarding animated icons, it just hit me that the Adium duck dock (heh) icon is already animated. It flaps it closes its eyes when the application isn't running, and flaps it wings when it wants attention (and I like it, actually... it's charming, but perhaps it would be too much if every icon did it to that extreme).

[Laurence]

The problem with the whole bitmap interface is that everything is way too small when you get a decent monitor.

I work in tech support for a major software company and over the last few years we have been getting more and more complaints about the legibility of the palettes in our applications. This is due to the bitmap nature of our software which, in turn, is caused by the limited system libraries we tie to.

An example we can all see is Adobe Photoshop. The palettes are almost too small to use if you are running a 19" monitor at 1600x1200. IBM has some monitor now that does something like 3600x2400 and it is only 21" That makes everything on screen too small to be efficient. The entire interface, icons included need to become completely vector by the time 10.6 comes out or most of the buttons in the applications will be too small to hit with the mouse. I would also expect that widescreen laptops with 1920x1080 resolution would have similar issues although I haven't actually used one.

[loki74]

Originally Posted by tooki

I don't for a second believe that a computer can create a functional reduced-detail icon. I am aware of LOD in gaming, but I don't believe it applies to icons because good icons aren't realistic. They are deliberately abstracted, and the smaller you go, the more abstracted they must be.

This is true. Not to mention, LOD in the context of traditional 3D is entirely different than what we are tlaking about here. In typical 3D appplications of LOD, subdivision is based on many factors, such as visibility and distance to camera, and happens at rendertime--differently subdivided meshes are not premade. To emply LOD as it is used in traditional 3D rendering would be unnecessarily complex for icons.

Originally Posted by tooki

Aside from the fact that 3D icons are, IMHO, a bad idea since the same icon may look different at different times (thus negating most of the value of an icon at all!), you'd basically need to have the designer make multiple versions of the icon for different sizes. Certainly there is no way to justify the effort in both implementing 3D icons in the OS and in requiring developers to create them: the result would likely be reduced usability.

totally true.

Originally Posted by tooki

I am not saying that 3D icons are always out of place: in a 3D app, they might be useful. Or once computers have 3D displays.

Actually, I dont see how 3D icons would be useful in 3D apps; no matter what function the program serves, its UI is still rasterized to a 2D plane (the screen), and on a 2D plane, 2D objects will always be best...

=====

IMHO, this whole 3D icon concept is foolish. It sounds cool, perhaps. But it is entirely not practical, and will decrease usability. Kinda like transparent windows...

EDIT: Another problem I realize is this--if we are going to talk about 3D icons, that would mean that the OS would have to be able to subdivide and smooth the mesh (especially if we are talking about using LOD). There are loads of algorithms for subDs out there, and consistency between the SDS algorithm of the program used to create the 3D model, and that of the OS may not always be guaranteed. Which means, the artist really wont know for 100% sure that the end user will see the same thing that he/she does...

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by Laurence

The entire interface, icons included need to become completely vector by the time 10.6 comes out or most of the buttons in the applications will be too small to hit with the mouse.

Not really. Even on a 15-inch-wide screen with a horizontal resolution of 2400 pixels, a 256-pixel-wide bitmap will not be too small to hit.

[ksloan2]

Originally Posted by loki74

EDIT: Another problem I realize is this--if we are going to talk about 3D icons, that would mean that the OS would have to be able to subdivide and smooth the mesh (especially if we are talking about using LOD). There are loads of algorithms for subDs out there, and consistency between the SDS algorithm of the program used to create the 3D model, and that of the OS may not always be guaranteed. Which means, the artist really wont know for 100% sure that the end user will see the same thing that he/she does...

What about manually created LOD models?

[icruise]

I had a program that gave you animated icons in Windows 3.1. Seemed cool at the time, but really added nothing to usability and was quite distracting. It's the equivalent of having a "kitty cat chasing a ball of yarn" as your mouse cursor.

[Horsepoo!!!]

Originally Posted by Laurence

The problem with the whole bitmap interface is that everything is way too small when you get a decent monitor.

I work in tech support for a major software company and over the last few years we have been getting more and more complaints about the legibility of the palettes in our applications. This is due to the bitmap nature of our software which, in turn, is caused by the limited system libraries we tie to.

An example we can all see is Adobe Photoshop. The palettes are almost too small to use if you are running a 19" monitor at 1600x1200. IBM has some monitor now that does something like 3600x2400 and it is only 21" That makes everything on screen too small to be efficient. The entire interface, icons included need to become completely vector by the time 10.6 comes out or most of the buttons in the applications will be too small to hit with the mouse. I would also expect that widescreen laptops with 1920x1080 resolution would have similar issues although I haven't actually used one.

Not necessarily vector...the bitmap icon sizes just need to be bumped up and scaled accordingly.

I'd be pleasantly surprised if 200 ppi or 300 ppi displays hit mainstream in the next 4 years. I'm thinking it'll take another 5-10 years before people have a 300 ppi 24" display on their desks.