X/Cygwin icon proposal

[Harold L Hunt II]

Earle F. Philhower, III wrote:

> Howdy Nahor,
> 
> For someone who's entire contribution to XWin has been
> an alpha-blended X icon you've got some loud opinions...

He's done much more than that.  His full name is "Jehan Bing" and it 
looks like the bulk of his work is here:

http://x.cygwin.com/devel/server/changelog-050.html

He added the "-nodecoration" parameter, scrollbar support, build rules 
for Windows resource files, lots of stuff.


>>Subject: Re: X/Cygwin icon proposal
>>From: Nahor <nahor@bravobrava.com>
>>Earle F. Philhower, III wrote:
>>
>>>Default to a safe icon format
>>
>>"Beep, sorry, you're computer was taken over by the icon then crashed, 
>>please reboot" :)
>>But anyway, the alpha *is* "safe" for other OS (well maybe not for NT, 
>>but I haven't heard back from haro about icon_test9 which seems to work 
>>fine for Alexander). It may not be to your taste but it is recognizable 
>>as the X logo.
> 
> 
> Looking really nasty under OSs earlier than XP is a bug I'd say.  Plus
> it's probably rechnically an invalid icon resource under those OSes so
> you may wnd up causing a boom (hey, under 95 or 98 it doesn't take
> much to crash the system!)
> 
> 
>>>Or, fix the code to detect the OS.  If OS>=Win5.0 use alpha icon,
>>>OTW use standard icon.  That can be done at runtime w/a few lines
>>>of C.
>>
>>Which one? The monochrome one? Or the one with the white background? 
>>Maybe the old one with the white specks? And how do you do the "runtime" 
>>thingy when XWin isn't running and Windows displays the icon in Explorer?
> 
> 
> You've not very familiar with how a shortcut is made, are you?  Make the
> 1st icon in the file the clean X-in-a-white-box that's been there for some
> time.  Windoze shortcuts then will use it by default.
> 
> Then, since you're so unhappy with the icon, submit a patch to the
> x-create-shortcut-icons package that checks the OS version
> and if it's XP or greater says create-shortcut w/icon 102, and voila...

But Windows has rules for picking icons from executables (but they are 
hard to find documentation on) and I would hope it is possible to order 
the icons and provide the proper formats such that the default icon for 
the *executable* (not shortcut) would be the one that looks nicest on 
the system.

I could very easily swap the order of the boxed icon and the non-boxed 
icons in our resource file to make the boxed icon the default, but I 
would rather not do that since I prefer the non-boxed icon on the 
executable.  Of course, I am a pragmatic guy, and if that doesn't work 
on all platforms then I will have to either swap the icons or include a 
simpler "ugly" non-boxed icon as the default in addition to the alpha 
blended icon in our resource file.

Harold