Graphics Archive

This new chapter describes the overall philosophy behind Aqua icons and shows how to design application, document, toolbar, and other types of icons for Mac OS X. To represent your application in Mac OS X, it's essential to create high-quality Aqua-style application icons that scale well in the various places the icon appears - the Dock, Finder previews, alert dialogs, and so on.

"The current generation of operating systems is much more powerful than they were in the days of DOS. We demand more from them now than ever before, and they've had to keep up with all of our needs and wants. As you know, an OS isn't just another standard piece of software. Instead, an operating system has to manage a complex set of system-level processes all at one time, and it's quite literally responsible for running the show. Therefore, it's easy to see why these systems take so long to develop and successfully release."

Normally I would never link to my own blog from OSNews, however, a few people have asked me to share this particular post, so I decided to make an exception. After playing with popular online photo sharing services Flickr and Picasa Web Albums, I wrote a review of these photo sharing sites. Feel free to post your thoughts in the comments.

Stardock on Tuesday released the 2007 version of its popular Object Desktop suite of Windows customization utilities. The package of tools enables customers to completely change the way Windows looks and functions to suit their personal tastes. Included in Object Desktop 2007 are the latest iterations of WindowBlinds, IconPackager, DesktopX, WindowFX, RightClick, Keyboard LaunchPad and more. Enhanced File Dialog is a newcomer to the suite, providing a much more expansive Open and Save dialog window than that offered in Windows.

AmanithVG is an implementation of OpenVG, the new application programming interface (API) for hardware accelerated 2D vector and raster graphics, created by the Khronos group. Differently from any other OpenVG implementation, AmanithVG is entirely built on top of OpenGL (from 1.1 to 2.0, using extensions where available) and OpenGL|ES (1.1 and 2.0) APIs. You can watch the AmanithVG video at YouTube.

Addison-Wesley sent us in the fourth edition of one of the most highly acclaimed user interface & usability books ever published: "Designing the User Interface", by Ben Shneiderman and Catherine Plaisant. Read more for a quick review.

Two former user interface designers at Apple and Microsoft - now co-workers at Frog Design - come together to discuss the design considerations that have gone into Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista.

The desktop metaphor has served our computing needs well for the last decade. It has started however, to show its age over the last years. For office users it is still adequate but for everyone else it is often awkward and slow. Since a computer is no longer confined in the office, but in some cases serves also as the entertainment hub in our living rooms, new User Interfaces are required. In some areas the foundations are already in place while in others users are silently suffering every day, having to cope with inefficient and unproductive UIs.

I used to really like skinning my desktops to make them look like another operating system. I stopped doing that years ago; and not necessarily because I wanted to do something more useful with my time. I stopped doing it because I somehow saw how utterly pointless it was. Why? I'll explain-- using Aston Martins and Jaguars. Yes, it's time for another car analogy, boys and girls. Note: This is this week's Sunday Eve Column.

"The new version 5 of WindowBlinds adds features like per-pixel alpha blending, as well as the ability to change toolbar icons, progress animations, and the hue and saturation of the Windows interface. WindowBlinds runs as a Windows XP extension to the Themes feature, so it doesn't require any additional program to run on your PC to work. It also takes advantage of your graphics processor to display its interface eye candy, so that your CPU won't slow down. In fact, the company claims that repainting, resizing, and moving windows will be noticeably quicker as a result of this use of video acceleration for the UI. The Hyperpaint feature even lets you adjust the degree of hardware acceleration. Hyperpaint uses the extra video RAM on your video card to buffer windows, which makes moving them faster."

Here is a test concerning NVIDIA SLI on Linux (in this case, OpenSUSE 10.0 OSS). "With our previous article that we published moments ago, demonstrating the performance of the GeForce 7800GTX 256MB under Linux with the 1.0-8174 Rel80 drivers that were finally released today, there's no disputing that the Windows XP NVIDIA ForceWare users can generally see a significantly higher frame-rate with the same hardware components, in addition to other features that aren't yet supported by the proprietary NVIDIA Linux drivers. However, how do NVIDIA's initial Rel80 Linux drivers (1.0-8174) fair in the world of Scalable Link Interface?"

" has existed (at least in concept) since the mid-90s, when IBM was going to use OpenDoc to add similar features to OS/2 Warp 5. DesktopX 1.0 was released in 2000. Five years later, we have version 3.1 in our hands. DesktopX in its present state is more than a mere widget manager. While it does include a widget manager, it does a couple other things."

"This article describes the features and capabilities of MiniGUI, a lightweight graphics framework for embedded systems based on uClinux, Linux, eCos, or proprietary real-time OSes. The article is written by Wei Yongming, who wrote MiniGUI for a CNC (computer numerical control) system, then released it to open source seven years ago."

Macromedia on Monday opened the doors to a new incubation site that hosts unfinished technology and early software releases. The goal of Macromedia Labs is to involve developers in the creation of new products, enabling them to provide feedback that can shape the company's future moves. Specifically, Macromedia Labs will offer documentation, code samples and technical articles, along with community services such as forums and wikis.