Lots of great advice. I don't think I will contemplate doing icons as
xaml any longer for the variety of reasons mentioned.
I am curious though. When it comes to the performance issue, what is the
difference between the rest of my xaml UI and the icons? Is it the case
that drawing and scaling (if required) say :
<Canvas Height="100" Width="100">
<Path Fill="{StaticResource
SomeLinearGradientBrush}".......>
.........
</Path>
</Canvas>
is a lot more cpu expensive than :
<Grid Background="StaticResource SomeLinearGradientBrush" Height="100"
Width="100">
</Grid>
Does it consume a lot of cpu plotting and scaling all the points on the
path? Which is not the case for buttons, grids, textblocks....?
Is the text rendering engine a lot more efficient generating the display than
processing a path?
On Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:33:47 +0530 wrote
>Having Icons in pure vector 100% of the time is an awful wasteof CPU J
nomatter how big/small they are in density. You should consider using
cachingthem as bitmap at runtime per state you keep them firstly failing that
convertthem to pure bitmap (PNG/JPG) could also work as well, if you can get
away withjust JPG that is also a lot smoother and more perf gain, given there's
no Alphato deal with by Silverlight.As for XAML ICON designers, any designer
you can get a hold ofwho specialise in Icon design (desktop illustrators etc)
are fine. Converting.AI/.EPS files to XAML is an easy task given ex-pression
Blend has importcapabilities for this kind of thing aswell. If you can't get
one to convertping me as i'd be curious to see why.From:
ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com[mailto:ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com]
On Behalf Of JohnOBrien
>Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 2010 3:24 PM
>To: 'ozSilverlight'
>Subject: RE: xaml iconsWe ran into trouble with animated xaml icons, we
were usinghundreds of these on a map and it did consume some CPU. We switched
to Jose’ssprite method using a series of frames as a single png image with
greatresults.If anyone is interested I made it into a reusable
control:http://deepearth.codeplex.com/sourcecontrol/network/Show?projectName=deepearth&changeSetId=37658#584181(I
really should start blogging all this stuff...)John.From:
ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com[mailto:ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com]
On Behalf Of MiguelMadero
>Sent: Tuesday, 9 March 2010 12:54 PM
>To: ozSilverlight
>Subject: Re: xaml iconsWhen using complex vector graphics, Ithinkyou should
consider not only the size, but also the CPU impact itmight have. I would hope
that for small icons this won't be an issue. I don'thave experience in this
area, but it's something I would try to test/googlebefore going with that
approach.
>On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 12:25 PM, JohnOBrien
<j...@soulsolutions.com.au>wrote:Icons are really timeconsuming for a
graphic designer, I like this site: http://www.iconfinder.netas it has good
quality free icons with a filter to show the ones allowed forcommercial use.
Even an API in there JI started out thinkingeverything in Silverlight should be
vector based XAML so it can scale to anysize but found it way too difficult to
create, I’m back to just using nice PNGimages. That said if you get a kit of
icons in a vector format then ex-pressiondesign should be able to convert them
to XAML, when comparing filesizesremember that the xaml will be zipped. I do
recommend comparing what thefilesize will be in xaml vs PNG and whether you
need them to scale beyond128x128px or 64x64px size.John.From:
ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com[mailto:ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com]on
Behalf Of Vishwanath Humpy
>Sent: Tuesday, 9 March 2010 10:56 AM
>To: ozsilverlight@ozsilverlight.com
>Subject: xaml iconsDoes anyone know of any good free or paid resource for
xamlicons? I can do them myself but I'm a bit slow and don't have a
graphicsdesigner by my side.
>
>I know there are plenty of converters, as well documented here, but you do
needsomething to convert :
>
>http://blogs.msdn.com/mswanson/pages/WPFToolsAndControls.aspx
>
>I also had hopes for this visio -> xaml but it doesn't work on my
machine :
>http://visioautomation.codeplex.com
>
>Or I am on the wrong track, perhaps icons are best left as pngs and I
shouldjust invest in an icon library such as http://www.iconshock.com/ and
forget about it ?
>_______________________________________________
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>
>--
>Miguel A. Madero Reyes
>www.miguelmadero.com (blog)
>m...@miguelmadero.com_______________________________________________
>ozsilverlight mailing list
>ozsilverlight@ozsilverlight.com
>http://prdlxvm0001.codify.net/mailman/listinfo/ozsilverlight
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