[haiku-development] Thoughts on Icon-O-Matic
- From: pete.goodeve@xxxxxxxxxxxx
- To: Haiku Development <haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:04:00 -0800
Having had my initiation into Icon-O-Matic, a few odd problems
and thoughts arose, so I'd like to pass them on for comment.
* Shapes should have checkboxes too. When I'm working with multiple layers
in a paint program, I like to be able to hide them individually, to get a
more exact idea of what each is contributing. I found I wanted to do the
same with shapes in Icon-O-Matic. This is possible by unchecking the
associated paths, but that's rather less convenient than a simple
checkbox on the shape would be.
* Would it be possible to load a (64x64) bitmap? Not as part of the icon
itself, of course, but as a guide to construction. With BeOS icons, I
tended to do that quite often, and on this (MIDI Port icon) project, I
had a photo I was working from, and it would have saved a lot of fiddling
to have that as a background to work from directly.
* A shape's rotation point should remain where placed, and not return to
the 'centroid' when you leave the shape and return to it. (A 're-centre'
menu option would then also be helpful.)
* I was using a Wacom tablet to do the drawing, which turned out to have some
disadvantages... Unlike a mouse, it is almost impossible to do a simple
click (because the pen-tip always moves when you press it), so any point
inserted in a path always ended up as a Bezier one -- whether I wanted that
or not!
Also the pen doesn't have a mouse-wheel (nor does the ThinkPad itself)
so I found no way to zoom the image.
* One other facility I thought would be useful is some way of placing
(foreground) 'Reference marks'. I wanted to rotate several shapes
about a common centre, and it was very hard to move the rotation point
to the same pixel for each. Being able to place a fixed reference --
in this case the actual centre of the image -- would have made things
much easier. (I ended up creating a dummy 'centre-point' shape, that
I suppressed when I was done with it.)
Cheers,
-- Pete --
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