>Regarding icons, I have started drawing them and shall limit my palette to
>less then 256 colors - in fact my preference is for the quickdraw eight
>because most people do not have such refined color accuity (believe it or not
>the french are significantly color blind - like 10% of the population. Paris
>is an annoying shade of green. And it rains like in london... too much
>inbreeding)
Eric,
that's sad. I'm not the one to use a gadzillion of colors in one icon, but
it looks certainly better if you use different shades of the same color to
give it a more three-dimensional look. I always liked Apple's "icon colors"
palette, but AFAIK it contains some colors that don't scale well to PCs if
they don't have true color.
>We should choose a default font. Helvetica is readable but I think it prints
>better than it looks on screen. MS Sans Serif?
I don't think that many people have this font. You have to remember, it
needs to be a font present on all platforms, since we can't require people
to buy a font just to use OC.
>I have started drawing icons. I have a few done as CICN and ICON resources.
>But if I understand correctly it is actually better that I draw them as picts.
>Not a problem, but it does seem 'strange'. I intend to post them as an
>attachment (sorry) in a later letter. Please not that with six arrows, and ten
>pixel sizes you wind up with a few hundred icons pretty quickly. The icons
>will be formatted in PICT unless there is a problem with that? I shall use the
>extension .PNG but I am clueless about which extension to use, so tell me
>otherwise if necessary.
>
>Oh, I'v also developed some graphics for cursors, and even a toolbar... Will
>submit today or tomorrow as an attachment.
Do *not* use ".PNG" as a suffix for a Pict file. That would be as if you
gave it the suffix ".GIF" -- many e-mail programs would mix it up. Also, I
think it would be smarter to put them up as GIF or JPG or PNG on a web site
than attaching them to this list, as many people here might not want to
have the whole collection here right now. If you don't have your own web
space, I'd suggest you ask Alain to give you access to the server so you
can upload the images there. Then just give us the URL and anyone
interested can look.
>If it matters(?) i would be content if we just make a player which allows
>writing of stacks. If we get to the point of standalones, well and good, but i
>sort of think that would be competing with metaCard - why bite a hand that
>feeds? If our player is less than 1 meg that increases portability. I for one
>am looking at my nice metaCard 2.3 meg standalone and wondering, hmm, how can
>I put it on a 1.44 meg disk? If it were hypercard i'd just res edit out the
>resources I do not need - but i cant because its all data fork! Do I use a hex
>editor? does it remain executable? Probably not.
MetaCard aims at programmers more than at "the rest of us". Also, although
I am thankful to MC, we wanted to create a HyperCard clone, which just has
to include standalones. There are some difficulties regarding standalones
since on many platforms programs can't change their file while they're
running, which is reauired to save changes to a standalone stack, but I
think in the long term we have to support them. Finally, I do think there's
room for both MC and OpenCard.
>So, I would like our player to be less than one meg so that it could be easily
>distributed, i.e. on one disk, or at least less than 1.44 meg compacted.
We'd all like this. I hope we succeed in creating such a small program. If
we don't, people can still re-compile OC with a few features left away.
Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
------------------------------------------------------------
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