NewIcons is a third-party extension to the
icon
An icon () is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, in the cultures of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Catholic churches. They are not simply artworks; "an icon is a sacred image used in religious devotion". The most ...
handling system for
AmigaOS
AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early version ...
2 and newer.
NewIcons was first invented and developed by the
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance language
*** Regional Ita ...
programmer
Nicola Salmoria
Nicola Salmoria is an Italian software developer. He is the original developer of MAME, an emulator application designed to recreate the hardware of arcade machines in software. In December 2002, he graduated from the University of Siena with a ...
. Subsequent development was done by
Eric Sauvageau and Phil Vedovatti.
History
The need for NewIcons arose from the poor overall quality of icons in AmigaOS versions prior to 3.0. While the AmigaOS
GUI
The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...
had been revolutionary when it was first launched in the early 1980s, other operating systems such as
Mac OS
Two major famlies of Mac operating systems were developed by Apple Inc.
In 1984, Apple debuted the operating system that is now known as the "Classic" Mac OS with its release of the original Macintosh System Software. The system, rebranded "M ...
and
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
quickly caught on and started to become more professional-looking. Standard AmigaOS Workbench icons were plain and uninteresting: limited to four colours, having no standard size, and viewed from a straight-on perspective that left them looking two-dimensional.
The aim of NewIcons is to solve all these faults. Unlike a standard Workbench icon, which only includes palette index information and is thus at the mercy of the user's chosen Workbench palette, NewIcons icons natively hold the actual
RGB
The RGB color model is an additive color model in which the red, green and blue primary colors of light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors. The name of the model comes from the initials of the three addi ...
colour information in the icon file itself. A memory-resident program (called a
Commodity
In economics, a commodity is an economic good, usually a resource, that has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them.
The price of a comm ...
in Amiga terminology) tries its best to adapt the icon's colours into the current Workbench screen palette. The NewIcons system supported icons sizes up to 93x93 pixels with up to 256 colours.
Features
NewIcons also establishes a standard icon size of 36×40
pixel
In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a raster image, or the smallest point in an all points addressable display device.
In most digital display devices, pixels are the smal ...
s, similar to those of Mac OS and Windows. The design guidelines recommend icons to be drawn at a more diagonal perspective, thus creating the illusion of three dimensions. The guidelines also strongly encourage the use of Workbench's "image" highlights, where a selected image changes its actual shape when clicked, instead of simply inverting its colours or becoming a darker shade. For example, a
computer terminal
A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that can be used for entering data into, and transcribing data from, a computer or a computing system. The teletype was an example of an early-day hard-copy terminal and ...
could have its screen powered up, a
pen
A pen is a common writing instrument that applies ink to a surface, usually paper, for writing or drawing. Early pens such as reed pens, quill pens, dip pens and ruling pens held a small amount of ink on a nib or in a small void or cavity wh ...
could write letters on paper, or a
robot
A robot is a machine—especially one programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically. A robot can be guided by an external control device, or the control may be embedded within. Robots may be c ...
symbolising a
computer game
Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device to gener ...
could move around.
NewIcons are relatively large in file size compared to conventional Amiga icons or
MagicWB
MagicWB is a third-party Workbench enhancer for AmigaOS. It was developed in 1992-1997 by Martin Huttenloher.
History
The idea to enhance Workbench arose when the author got bored with the gray and abstract icons provided by Commodore. The origin ...
icons. NewIcons encodes the icon data in a 7-bit encoding in
ASCII
ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...
. It stores the colour information as 8-bit data and the image data is encoded in the number of bits needed to address the colour map index.
DefIcons
NewIcons also includes DefIcons, a package of ready-made icons which aims to provide a default icon image for all files that do not have their own associated icons (provided as
.info
files in AmigaOS).
DefIcons uses a scheme that actually examines the file's contents instead of simply looking at the filename extension to determine the file type. This approach is slower than the file extension system used by
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
, but ultimately more accurate; a PNG image file with a .JPG extension will appear with a PNG-specific icon.
GlowIcons
AmigaOS 3.5 introduced GlowIcons icon format and supported NewIcons without need of third-party applications.
The GlowIcons format, based on the more general IFF file format, is the native
icon
An icon () is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, in the cultures of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Catholic churches. They are not simply artworks; "an icon is a sacred image used in religious devotion". The most ...
format used in AmigaOS 3.5, 3.9 and 4.0 by Matt Chaput. The major difference to NewIcons is how image data is stored. NewIcons uses inefficient ASCII encoding embedded to the application Tool Type metadata. In GlowIcons system developers extended internal icon definition without need to resort to storing information as Tool Types. The standard icon size is 46×46
pixel
In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a raster image, or the smallest point in an all points addressable display device.
In most digital display devices, pixels are the smal ...
s with maximum 256 (
8-bit
In computer architecture, 8-bit Integer (computer science), integers or other Data (computing), data units are those that are 8 bits wide (1 octet (computing), octet). Also, 8-bit central processing unit (CPU) and arithmetic logic unit (ALU) arc ...
) colours and two image states (example: open and closed drawers). The second image state generally uses a glow effect to indicate that the icon is pressed.
Starting with the "Final Update" AmigaOS 4.0 supports 32 bit icon images.
These features were later back-ported so older OS version could also use all icon formats
[ Keunecke, Pete]
"Amiga Icon Library V46.4"
'' Aminet'', 18 December 2022
References
External links
NewIcons package on Aminet
{{DEFAULTSORT:Newicons
AmigaOS
MorphOS
Computer icons