Haiku With Scalable Vector Graphics

Details

The latest Haiku image (21.21 MB) is now making use of the new, improved Deskbar and Tracker with support for scalable vector graphics. Also Stephan Assmus' award winning icon set, Stippi, has been included:

 

Image

The improved Tracker supports the following icon sizes: 16x16 (Mini Icon View), 32x32, 40x40, 48x48 and 64x64. As you can see from the screenshot, only a few icons have been finished. Having said that, this is a great start and the quality of the few icons is high.

Stephan Assmus has sent us a screenshot showing Haiku running with far more scalable icons, along with some additional information.

Image

Things noteworthy about the new icons:

1. Each icon takes about Bytes of storage space (600-700 on average), compared to the fixed 1280 Bytes that R5 icons use. The new Windows Vista icons take up to 80 KBytes, Vista is the first Windows that adds support for compressed icons (PNG). PNG support will also be added to Haiku, in order to better support icons which originate from photos.

2. Each icon contains its own true color palette and support for transparency.

3. Icons are rendered in a single pass, not every shape in its own pass, being both faster and more correct (no seems between shapes).

4. There is support for "level of detail" meaning one icon could look different at different sizes, some icons use this to have less detail at small sizes, or have a stronger outline at 16x16.

5. All icons were created with Haiku's own Icon-O-Matic editor, the editor has it's own native format, with for example support for naming each shape, style and path. It also supports reading and writing of SVG (simple, but all McClintock and zuMi icons load fine).

6. The support for the new format in Haiku is throughrough, only few things are missing yet (device drivers that return an icon are unchanged yet). For example both DiskProbe and FileTypes already support it, and every "old" app that uses the R5 icon API will get the new icons, although rendered at 256 colors if necessary. Support for the old icons is also still there, as well as direct support for vector icons in the BNode, BNodeInfo, BMimeType, BAppFileInfo etc classes. There was no special changes to Tracker with regards to vector icons, only the bitmap format changed from 256 colors to true color, and support for using alpha blending was added as well as chosing other icon sizes. The actual vector icon support sits in libbe. There is a new class BIconUtils that can be used to deal with icons.