I like the new set a lot. There are a couple of icons that seem a little too bright for my taste (although I initially thought that about the new drawers and I'm used to them already) and I'm not convinced with some of the icons for dockeys, but they're probably not going to be seen much and that's easily made up for great ones like the little OS4 windows and the gradients on the monitors Looking good, Mason

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3) What are "DephToFront", "PowerMenus" and "AmiAlbedo" tools??

If DepthToFront is anything like DepthMenu off Aminet then it allows you to right-click on depth gadgets to give a menu of all open windows, and bring them to the front.

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UGH! NO! NO DROP SHADOWS!!!!

And good riddance I'm not running OS3.9 myself, but on the screenshots I've seen the shadows only seem to work properly with a very limited range of backgrounds, and look terrible with some. IMHO shadows should either be done "properly" with an alpha channel, or not at all

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Looking good! Thanks for the update. Just makes me wish even more I had OS4 on my A1. Is it nearly done??!!

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AmigaOne XE-G4, 512MB RAM (AmigaOS 4.1)
Radeon 9250, Terratec Aureon 5.1
CDRW, DVDRW, SII0680

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Ehrm, I don't get it.... If you go to Font preferences, and use the "Text & Field" setting, the Workbench screen will look almost the same. I thought you where referring to Windows XP (which has the same Text with dropshadow effect like in my screenshot).

That is windows xp. Perhaps setting it to the classic look causes the field to be coloured. I guess I'll be using text & field when I get OS4.

Incidently, one other feature I think would be nice in OS4 is snap-to-grid icons, where the icons automatically arrange themselves into a fixed position whenever they are moved (so you can't move them around to some abstract location). This maintains neatness in icon arrangement and you don't need to keep going to 'clean up' if you move the icons out of place. Of course, in windows the icons are all the same size, which makes snap-to-grid easier, but I'm sure it would be possible to write an algorithm that will work with variable-sized icons as well to position them in a grid-like manner. I'd like that.

Some icons are very nice. For example:
USB
Sound
Pointer
Notepad/memacs
Lacer
USB inspector
Mounter
Shell
Find
Keymaps
Screens
Amiga Input
Serial
Devs
Playcd

Icons that i like less:
Button.docky
subdock.docky (it must be more rounded)
Workbench (maybe the screenshots, but the table legs seems to plain)
Input (too dibimensional)


Anyway i like this set. It is a little different from the standard Glow Icons so it need to be used a little before judging

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ikir

Hmm, some are nice, others need more work - the contrast on the colors is too low. I'm sorry to say, that the Lorraine design PowerIcons are much better, and I recommend anyone with a graphics card and 3.9 to use them. The way deficons (i.e. file with no .info) are translucent is great!.

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DaveyD:
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Sorry but I agree with BrianHoskins, the icons are not clearly defined enough for my liking

Kind of agree with Davey, some of the icons are really cool like GrimReaper, ones with mini OS4 sytle windows, and the USB ones, but others like Internet, input, minimizer and unarc are a bit bland looking - they could just use some more detail/shading variation - think I prefer the old ones overall - and where's the question marks gone on the preferences icons?

I'm with ShInKurO (welcome, btw) on this - the old question marks were far nicer than this slidy-thing. Every version of Workbench has had a question mark associated with the prefs, it's kind of traditional. The Input prefs icon is horrible, the old style GlowIcon was far better. Oh, and usbrestart and usbstart seem to have the same icon (I assume usbstart is supposed to have a "play" icon rather than "rewind").

The WBPattern icon shows a hideous pattern, which is pretty much what you get if you play with the pattern bit of it. The icons are generally pretty darn nice.

DefIcons prefs: I've never really understood why. There is a perfectly good filetype identification routine in datatypes.library, so why doesn't it use this? (cue people complaining about datatypes.library being slow)

Chris

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"Miracles we do at once, the impossible takes a little longer" - AJS on Hyperion
Avatar is Tabitha by Eric W Schwartz

The icons have real problems. There is an attempt at 3-dimensional art, but the designer didn't use any dark lines to show corners, so the only visual clue of a corner is a change in color. The problem with this is that he resorts to an excessive use of contrast. The Printers drawer and all the hard drive tool-related icons look... weird. Ditto the gears on the Devs drawer and the FontManager icon. Compare these to this earlier screenshot; notice the loss of clarity in the newer icons; you have to look at them longer to understand what they're showing. The WBClock icon (upper left) is even painful to look at; from a near-white in the upper left to a dark gray in the middle? This is a flat surface!

These icons demonstrate that one can get carried away with anti-aliasing. Sorry, but these icons are not what I would like on my desktop, and they will not make a good first impression to most non-Amiga users.

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I've decided to follow an awful lot of people I respect and leave AmigaWorld. If for some reason you want to talk to me, it shouldn't take much effort to find me.

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the old question marks were far nicer than this slidy-thing

The association you usually get with a question mark is "help". Although Amiga users are typically aware of the old "Preferences" icon(s) and the questionmark, this is atypical. The "slider", however, signifies that you can regulate/switch/select something, which is closer to what preferences are. Icons don't need to be aestetic only, they need to convey a meaning, and in this case I'm all for using the slider, even if it breaks tradition.

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Oh, and usbrestart and usbstart seem to have the same icon (I assume usbstart is supposed to have a "play" icon rather than "rewind").

My fault. I copied them over one-by-one, and did accidential use the same icon twice.

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DefIcons prefs: I've never really understood why. There is a perfectly good filetype identification routine in datatypes.library, so why doesn't it use this? (cue people complaining about datatypes.library being slow)

The answer is quite easy - you'd only have an icon for those filetypes that you actually have datatypes installed. That isn't always the case, for example if you have a CSS style sheet and no CSS-Capable browser.

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Having had a second look at my current OS3.9 setup and earlier OS4 shots, I would personally much rather have the old glow icons over these new ones - in their current state I feel they would only warrant a place in the contributions drawer and definately not as the default set, although I would imagine these new icons are still work-in-progress and I could be persuaded in the future. Mason has produced so many great glow icons and toolbar icons, my system's littered with them - I don't really get what's gone wrong with these .

Hmm, I think I'm gonna have to go with the crowd who don't like the iconset. In fact, and I'm sorry Mason because I know you're very talented, I'd say apart from the USB icons and the GrimReaper, the rest are truely awful.

Now don't start jumping on my back, I sure as hell couldn't do any better myself, but I really think Mason's original GlowIcons are so much better.

The thing I think spoils this lot, is the use of so many different colours for each icon, and the overuse of gradients on almost every icon. They just don't look like a set, more like a screen made of several sets.

I think the fact that the old icons worked well together and looked like a whole set was because they all shared the same 32 colour palette. Sort of bound the icons together with each other.

These ones are all too bright, don't have much definition and look rather flat without a nice shadow...

I suppose though that it is a matter of taste and of course you'll be able to change them to whatever you wish... then again, for a default look, I don't think it'll float many people's boat.

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It's not a problem you can stop, It's rock n' roll - GN'F'N'R

A problem of icons IMHO is a eccessive bright in icons like drawers, PlayCD,RexxMast, UnARC, the cd icons into directory "Disks",Workbench,Font, instead icons like USB,Serial,AHI,ASL, the icons in WBStartup, and GrimReaper are very beautiful....
....please please, Lorianne Design paints pretty icons for tools, but the black-pico-drawers are bad and out of the Amiga Style Design GUI

ShInKurO

P.S.: A petition for the "question point icon" style for prefs?

Rogue:
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The association you usually get with a question mark is "help". Although Amiga users are typically aware of the old "Preferences" icon(s) and the questionmark, this is atypical. The "slider", however, signifies that you can regulate/switch/select something, which is closer to what preferences are. Icons don't need to be aestetic only, they need to convey a meaning, and in this case I'm all for using the slider, even if it breaks tradition.

Understand your point but I do hate those slider things - they don't convey much to me, it's kind of unclear what they are anyway on these icons. I've associated the question mark with preferences right from first using an Amiga for the first time back in 1992 and I've got pretty use to it

The icon set looks beter than before but I have to say it, I don't like this" heavy" 3D style of icons and workbench. I have to confess, I like OS X style a lot.
But OS4 is almost fully configurable isn't it?

PS. It's almost impossible to make everyone happy so gentlemen for your hard work.

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Incidently, one other feature I think would be nice in OS4 is snap-to-grid icons, where the icons automatically arrange themselves into a fixed position whenever they are moved (so you can't move them around to some abstract location). This maintains neatness in icon arrangement and you don't need to keep going to 'clean up' if you move the icons out of place. Of course, in windows the icons are all the same size, which makes snap-to-grid easier, but I'm sure it would be possible to write an algorithm that will work with variable-sized icons as well to position them in a grid-like manner. I'd like that.

Furthermore, I've grown an affinity for hovering selection, like when the graphic of a button changes in windows when you move your mouse over it. Perhaps an optional feature to have icons select when you hover over them would be nice? And buttons too...

To Rogue:

Oh, so those little round thingies are supposed to be sliders. I understand and agree with the rationale for their use (now that you've described it).

The problem is that they don't actually look like sliders (at least not to me) when they're placed in a tiny circle like that. They looked more like strange spherical objects. Since they were part of prefs icons I knew they were trying to communicate something about preferences. But I honestly didn't have a clue what they were. I spent several minutes trying to figure it out. And I'm viewing them in 1024 x768 in 32 bit. That should surely be an adequate resolution to decipher them.

I think whatever images are used for icons they should instantly and successfully communicate first their general function (prefs) and then their specific function. I think the particular sliders depicted in these circles fail to carry out their first duty successfully.

However, I might note, the smaller more complete slider image used for the presets icon was immediately recognizable to me, even though it was smaller. Perhaps a rectangle for holding the slider image is more effective than using a circle which tends to obscure the message of vertical motion.

And I would add, I'm not sure this can be reduced entirely to a matter of taste. Taste presupposes the ability to understand, discriminate and choose between a set of different but adequate solutions. In this case, for me at least, I found the information in the image confusing and nonsensical. So, taste had little bearing on my reaction.

Regarding taste - In general I like the new icon set. Though they're somewhat brighter with a little more green and blue than I usually like. I think the bright greenish and bluishness will probably look better to me on a darker background. Also, one other specific note: to me the sphere in the datatypes icon looks rather flat while the box and the cone appear to be more 3-D.

And, (responding to a couple of previous posters) I for one really like glow icons, "radiance for the chosen" or "glow for the selected." It makes perfect sense to me.

Anyway, as everyone, I am quite excited and eager for OS4. And these will do just fine. I appreciate Mason's hard work.

And Rogue, thank you for your deep commitment to this project.

-amygdala

Sorry to disagree with everyone here but I could never figure out what the ? was supposed to represent in prefs!

I like the slider thingy, nice clean style and it actually makes some sense.

The only thing is Rogue beat me to it!

I do agree with most that the grimreaper is nice.

I like the look of the icons but as someone mentioned earlier they don't all look as though they belong to the same icon set! I think it has to do with the introduction of new icons (i.e. usb, serial etc) and mixing with more traditional old style?

Keep up the good work! Thx Mason!

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If I'm allowed to supply some (hopefully constructive) criticism, it is that they blend to well into
the background, giving the display a rather bland impression.
Hand-Joerg should have picked a darker background to show them in all their splendor, I
suppose... As it is it seems to me that they really lack the black border to make them univerally
usable on any background.
Which is a shame, because the icons look really nice otherwise.
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SlimJim

I have to agree, the icons are missing "something", they look good but at the same time kinda bland. How about adding a simple black border around them? (not a rectangular black border, but the sort of black border that cartoon characters have) That might improve things, at least they will stand out a lot more.

This reminds me of the first time the OS4 window look was demonstrated. It was pretty bland, people suggested ways to improve it and the current look is pretty darned good! Maybe the same will happen with the icons, people can suggest constuctive ways to improve them, and Mason can see if the suggestions are worth implementing.

To me, the icons seem to lack depth and dimension. They look flat. I don't think this is necessarilly a bad thing, it's more of a contrast to the newicons/glowicons we are used to. I think I could get used to these ones.