Icon-A-Day, Icon # 88 - 93, Optical Disks
A Bonus Pack of Disks, just for fun
Thursday, May 12, 2005 by mormegil | Discussion: Icons
Icon 88 (Optical Disks) I have missed a few days, so I wanted to make up with a bonus pack. While Windows includes all these types of disks inside the the Shell32.dll I do not know of anyway of changing them on a system level, other than a hack. Hopefully IconPackager will find a way to do so before to long. One more reason to do these disks is that CandyBar for OS 10 supports them. So just for fun, and because they are all pretty simple, I figured what the heck. So with no further ado, I give you the Optical Disks. | ||
Step 1: So this will be pretty simple, First we get ourselves a nice copy of the CD icon. |
Step 2:
Now we copy over one of our pens from any one of our file icons that we have made already. |
Step 3: Now we create two simple rectangles, set a 50% Transparency setting; one in a color and one white for a nice line. |
Step 4:
Now we simple use the Text Tool to add the type of drive access to the colored bar, making sure it is placed behind the glare. |
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Step 5: Now we need one more element to make the rest of our Disk Types: a pencil. This we start by mocking up a pencil with some mesh rectangles. |
Step 6 Now with our standard Mesh Tool Techniques we start molding our pencil. |
Step 7: More mesh editing... |
Step 8: And still more mesh editing.
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Step 9: Last we use our Shadow and Reflection techniques to finish off our pencil. |
Finished Second Icon. Note: The rest of our types we do with exactly the same steps, but changing the colors, and the text. |
Download the Completed Icons here.
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Now that we have a all the common Optical Disk types, we will move on. We have a few other bonus Disk types that we will polish off before we move on toward the end of our pack. |
Apple sucks iBalls!
Tiger gives me few more reasons to stay a dog person.
Tuesday, May 10, 2005 by mormegil | Discussion: OS Wars
Today was a great day of disappointments for me on the computer front. After much pondering, for reasons I will explain, I decided to take a trip to the Apple store and Upgrade my Mac to OS-10.4 "Tiger". I have had a Mac for 3 years now. I spent $3000 on it, and have used it probably a grand total of maybe 80 hours. This is my own fault. There is nothing really wrong with it. It is just that I find myself using my PC. I'm a windows fan, even though that's not something most people will admit. As a skinner and a customizer there is much more possible in windows. This, along with a long list of reason why I don't use my Mac much, have caused it to be a bit neglected. Today I wanted to remedy that. So with much to-do I drove to the mall - a place I try to avoid at all costs - went into the Apple store and to my surprise managed to get a copy of "Tiger" without any of the sales people talking down to me. (This is something that I have become used to at the Apple store). $129 later I left the mall and aside from a great disappointment when I find out that Wetzel Pretzel is out of Grateful Garlic pretzels (I cried only a little), I start home with joy in my heart, and a fancy pull string bag full of OS-10.4 . On a side note; I could not help but notice that the nice Apple black box with the big brushed silver X that Tiger ships in is almost an exact duplicate of the 1990's teaser poster for "Malcom X". Coincidence..... well, probably. Now I get home, and the annoyances begin. First a bit of background. I bought my Dual G4 Power Mac Right when OS 10.2 had just been released. 10.2 was a big improvement over 10.1 so I was pretty happy with it. It did what I wanted and I do not use the Mac much so I never updated to 10.3 "Panther". I still had iMovie, and iPhoto, and iDVD installed. They had been updated several times and worked fine (when I found the time to play with them). A year or so ago they quit giving away iDVD and I hardly noticed. I still had the version that came with 10.2 and I had never actually used it, so I did not care much. I remember Steve Jobs saying in his Keynote at the time, "You can still get iMovie, and iPhoto, and iTunes, for free, and if you buy "iLife" you get iDVD as well, plus a bunch of crap." OK so that's not quite a quote, but that was the gist of it. Shortly after that I became quite busy with my new job and much more interested in the PC side of things again. In short, I quit paying attention to what was going on with Apple. Sure I caught the highlights, "Garage Band" comes out and "Dashboard vs. Konfabulator", but over all my Mac attention span was about as short as the amount of time that my Mac was on. This, I discovered today, was a bit of a mistake for me. | |
First problem: Now, it seams that I have lost some software. I am a bit pissed, but I don't use the iApps often except iTunes, and that one primarily on my PC. So I decide to suck it up an live with it. I suppose if I cared enough I could do a fresh install of 10.2, then upgrade it to 10.4. But I don't quite feel up to that. | |
Dashboard, or as I like to call it, "The Great Anti-Climax" Moving on. Now lets check out these cool new apps. First, since I am a skinner and I was one of the first people to start messing with DesktopX, I have to check out DA, DA, DAAAA, Dashboard. Now Dashboard was getting a lot of airtime, because on the surface it seams a blatant rip-off of Konfabulator, which is more or less a Mac version of DesktopX. (Another debate all together; we won't get into it here). Well the good news is that Konfabulator should not have much to worry about. Dashboard pretty much sucks. Now this is my opinion only but I can tell you what: I'm not impressed. Sure the graphics are nice, sure they have some nice widgets. BUT, and this is a big but, YOU CAN NOT LEAVE A WIDGET RUNNING ON THE DESKTOP. They only appear on the "Dashboard". The dashboard is essentially a full screen window that darkens the rest of the screen, and with nifty effects pulls you widgets out to be visible. So essentially you are task switching to reach them. At this point you can just switch to the real app. I realize that this means that if you want to see any one Dashboard widget, you have to show them all. You can't, for example, leave a to-do list up on you desktop and work in an app; its all or nothing. This should be Apples slogan. OK OK, but the widgets are so pretty.... So are Konfabulators. Well, that is also disappointing, but perhaps I am overlooking something. I go to the Dashboard configuration. Humm what can I change... I can change the keys it uses, I can set up hot corners to call up the Dashboard. That's it. OK I'm still annoyed by this..... Lets move on. Now still sticking with Dashboard I click on the Icon in the dock and it slides up this nifty tray of widgets. All of the provided widgets are very polished and work well. I try a few and am impressed by their cool spinney 3D effects that make it so the configuration for the widgets are on the back of each widget. You have to see this to under stand but its pretty sweet and makes me long for Longhorn to get its compositor working 100%. Hear that Ian? That sadly is about all that impressed me with Dashboard. When you go to the "More Widgets" webpage you find some nice widgets and some crap in about the same mix you find at WinCustomize or the Konfabulator gallery, but nothing to rock my world. Needless to say I don't need a "Next Episode of Stargate" countdown widget. That's what my PVR is for. One last thing of note: not all widgets are free. This is not surprising, but something to remember next time you see a pay suite or theme. Well...one last bitch about Dashboard: I was assuming that since Apple makes dashboard and they have full control of the OS that it would be very well integrated. So I check out the weather widget. Its pretty sweet. Nice graphics. New shiny weather Icons, nice. Let me change the zip from the default of Atlanta to mine. Look there the 6 day forecast, that's nice. I continue playing with Dashboard and when you call up the bottom tray these little X's appear in the corner of all the widgets. One of the early problems we had with DesktopX is that people did not know how to close objects, so I am glad to see that they have included that. So I close the weather widget. This turns out to be a bit of a mistake. It seams when you close a widget it is as if it was never run. That's right, when I run the widget again I have to change the zip, position it, as well as set it to show the 6 day forecast, all over again. Now I don't know if this is the case with all the widgets, but it seems that Dashboard only remembers settings for widgets that are running. You can't open and close them at you leisure and expect to keep the settings you have established. You have to leave them running ALL THE TIME. Well like I said, you cant have them visible while you work in any other app, so I guess it is not really a drain on memory, but let me just say if I made a widget for DesktopX that behaved like that I would get flamed with complaints, and I would deserve it. |
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Well, it is late, and I have been ranting too long. I shall try and summarize my OS 10.4 "Tiger" experience. The loss of my iApps was my fault for not reading the manual first but still, come on Apple, this is the kind of bait and switch that you would be screaming at Microsoft for doing, and everyone would be screaming for court action. Luckily Apples market share is so small that they can get away with things like that. (Well lucky for them at least). I assume that eventually I will crack an buy a copy of iLife that I will never use and Apple will be a little closer to being popular enough to start suing. I am sure there have been tones of usability fixes and such, but the one thing that I was looking for, better Samba sharing, was still not there. Come on Apple, can't you have one of you programmers take a day to come up with a GUI for the smb.conf file? I have been able to right click on a folder or drive in windows and share it since windows 3.11. You just took Samba for UNIX, can't you afford to at least give it a pretty face? As for Dashboard; very pretty at first glance. For a skinner or widget user it is pretty much useless. I will be keeping Konfabulator on the Mac and have already begun the search for a way to disable Dashboard. This is a great example of how an idea can be taken, yet not understood at all. I could be wrong. I'm sure some people out there are wild about Dashboard. I can just say I'm not one.
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Icon-A-Day, Icon #87, Removable Drive
The Last of the Default Drives
Sunday, May 8, 2005 by mormegil | Discussion: Icons
Icon 86 (Removable Drive) We have one last Default Drive type: the Removable Drive icon. This used to be used most often for Zip Drives, Jazz Drives and the like. These days it is most commonly used to represent USB Drives, and most common of these are Thumb drives. So I decided to go with that for our icon today. I did not want to use some a real Thumb drive. Instead I am just going to make something up that will match the rest of our Icon-A-Day drive icons. Off we go. | ||
Step 1: It is going to be a bit hard make this look good, since Thumb drives are usually longer than wide, and will be a bit thin to fill the Square icon. As always I start with some rectangles to start shaping our drive. |
Step 2:
Once I have my forced perspective working I start with the USB Connection, using some mesh fills to give it a metallic look. |
Step 3: Now I give the connections some detail, the contacts inside the plug, and two "holes" in the plug. |
Step 4:
Now we go back to our Mesh Tool and start giving the body of the drive some detail, bevels, and changes in the grey as we have used in the rest of our drives and hardware. |
Step 5: Now we give the drive body a brush texture with our Interactive Transparency Techniques. |
Step 6: To make sure this icon matches, we give the metal body of the icon a nice gloss. |
Step 7: Now we need our standard Reflection. |
Step 8: Last we give the drive a nice Shadow. |
Finished Icon Image. |
Click here to download the finished icon. | ||
That brings us to the end of our standard Drive icons, but I still want to do a few more Bonus Drive icons. I also want to use these on my Mac so I am going to make sure we included all the CD and DVD types. I think we will try and take care of those next. |
Suffering from Longhorn or Tiger envy?
Upgrading Windows with Object Desktop 2005
Thursday, May 5, 2005 by Frogboy | Discussion: OS Wars
With the recent release of MacOS X "Tiger" and Microsoft talking about the next major version of Windows, code-named "Longhorn", Windows 2000 and Windows XP users might be feeling a bit of tech envy. If so, Stardock has a cure for those OS blues in the form of Object Desktop 2005.
Object Desktop is actually a collection of OS extension utilities designed for Microsoft Windows 2000 and XP. When installed, users gain a host of new features that often go far beyond what future operating systems will provide. For example, Object Desktop 2000 was allowing users to "skin" the entire Windows UI, including the Start bar, before Windows XP was even a twinkle in Microsoft's eye. Object Desktop was providing features such as alpha bended shadows under windows before Apple had even coined the term "Aqua" to describe the MacOS X interface. And today, while Apple and Microsoft are playing technological leap-frog, Object Desktop 2005 has features that offer a glimpse of what may be coming to an operating system near you.
One of the features of Apple's new MacOS X Tiger operating system is "Dashboard". Dashboard allows users to add "widgets" that provide useful functionality and information on the desktop. Object Desktop 2005 not only has widgets but allows them to live on the desktop full time. Hot keys are available to show and hide them as needed but they can also live side-by-side with your desktop icons. It was Object Desktop that delivered enhanced, end user created, mini-application functionality onto the desktop long before anything similar appeared on Windows or Mac in the form of DesktopX (one of the programs that makes up Object Desktop). DesktopX, however, doesn't stop at just widgets. Users can literally design their own desktop environments with it and export them for later use or to share with others.
Another hot-topic in the "OS Wars" has been Avalon. Avalon is a new display system that debuts in its full form in Longhorn. It allows all kinds of interesting effects to be achieved on the desktop. But Windows users need not wait until Longhorn to get a small taste of what Avalon can do. Object Desktop 2005 has WindowFX, a program that lets users scale windows on the fly, create transition effects and window morphing, shadows, and a host of transparency options. And as the Longhorn beta approaches, Stardock is already at work to make sure Object Desktop takes full advantage of new features available in Longhorn for developers. For users who are looking to have their Windows desktops appear similar to Longhorn today, they can do that with WindowBlinds. WindowBlinds allows for enhanced visual styles to be applied that can change the look and feel of Windows completely. It also speeds up the drawing of windows when they're being moved and resized over the base "Luna" visual style in Windows. It's so powerful that Alienware recently licensed it to create their Star Wars based desktops.
But Object Desktop isn't just about making Windows look and feel better. It's about productivity and functionality. A new program in Object Desktop 2005 is RightClick. RightClick lets users replace their desktop right-click menu with one of their own creation that can have links to programs, system information, virtual desktops, and much more on it. It can be brought up at any time by hitting the Windows key and is powerful enough to be used instead of the Windows Start bar (and includes an option to hide the Start bar). Major updates to other programs that make up Object Desktop along with the inclusion of a new Object Desktop LaunchPad help make Stardock's award-winning package compelling to power users and administrators alike.
All told, Object Desktop includes nearly two-dozen programs and has won numerous awards including PC Magazine's Editor's Choice Award. It's $49.95 for the whole suite and entitles the user to a year's access to ObjectDesktop.net where new programs and updates to existing programs to Object Desktop can be found. With Longhorn looming, that means users of Object Desktop 2005 will be able to get the best of both worlds and not have to worry that their Mac-using friends have something over them. After all, the upgrade for Mac users to Tiger is $129, over twice as much as Object Desktop costs.
Product: Object Desktop 2005
Developer: Stardock Corp. (www.stardock.com)
Price: $49.95
Requires: Windows 2000/XP.
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Icon-A-Day, Icon # 86, RAM Drive
One for the power users.
Wednesday, May 4, 2005 by mormegil | Discussion: Icons
Icon 86 (RAM Drive) Today's icon is pretty obscure. Not many of us use RAM Drives these days, but it is supported in the default icons in an Icon Package. This one is always kind of odd, but I tend to use a Memory Chip. Today we will do the same. The techniques for doing today's icon are once more almost the same as the last two days. | ||
Step 1: We will start with several rectangles, making up the basic shapes of our chip. |
Step 2:
Now again we use the Perspective Tool to give our chip the basic perspective we want. |
Step 3: Now we need to add some depth to the icon. So I copy some of the rectangles, mirroring them and shading them to see if they work. |
Step 4:
Now to round the shape of the chip a bit, I replace the to main rectangles with two Mesh Rectangles. |
Step 5: Just to make the chip look a bit more realistic we give it some texture with our Interactive Transparency Techniques. |
Step 6: Now with some rectangles and the Text Tool we create some printing to go on the drive, using the Perspective Tool to lay the image on the chip. |
Step 7: Once more our last step is to polish it off with our Shadow and Reflection Techniques. |
Finished Icon Image. |
Click here to download the finished icon. |
Tomorrow we will polish of the Default Drive types with the Removable Drive icon. |
Icon-A-Day, Icon # 85, SD Card
Moving on through the Drive icons.
Tuesday, May 3, 2005 by mormegil | Discussion: Icons
Icon 85
(SD Card) Moving on through the Drive icons, these days I find myself using SD Cards as my primary form of flash memory. Since I use it the most I want to get it out of the way right away. The steps for this are almost identical to yesterdays icon. The only real different is the basic shapes. So lets do it. | ||
Step 1: First we draw out the shapes of the media with several rectangles, tweaking them a bit with the node edit tool. |
Step 2:
Once more we group our objects
together and use the Perspective Tool to lean our disk back. |
Step 3: Quickly we add some detail to the edge of the card with a few rectangles. I quickly fill in the shapes so that I can tell the shading is ok. |
Step 4:
Now we give the Card their final
colors, including the yellow lock. I also give the full card a bit of texture
with our
Interactive
Transparency Techniques. |
Step 5: Now using simple Text Tools and
the basic drawing tools to make an SD logo and some text to place on the card. |
Step 6: Now we use the Perspective Tool and some basic drawing tools to give the label some details. I also give the the label a bit of Gloss. |
Step 7: |
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Click here to download the finished icon. |
There we go, a nice SD
Card icon. I think tomorrow we will take care of the Ram Drive icon. See you all
then. |
Icon-A-Day, Icon # 82, 5" Floppy
Why? Because it's there.
Thursday, April 28, 2005 by mormegil | Discussion: Icons
Icon 82 (5" Floppy) Tonight we will start polishing off the rest of the Drive icons. I will also be doing some bonus drive type icons, but that will be in a few days. As for today we will do the one of the simplest icons, and yet one of the most useless. But it is still supported and I am sure if I did not include it,there would be someone, somewhere who would miss it. So with no further ado, I give you the 5 Inch Floppy Disk. | ||
Step 1: We start off with a circle and some rectangles, giving us the basic shape and elements. |
Step 2:
Once I have my disk elements I group them using the Perspective Tool to slant it back. |
Step 3a: Quickly I give the shapes some basic fills to see how the elements work together. |
Step 4:
Now we copy the face of the disk and off-set it just a bit, giving the first one the darkest fill, so there is a visible edge. |
Step 5: Now I copy the face of the drive again and change the fill to black. I also give the new copy a Transparent texture. |
Step 6: Now we touch up the rest of the fills giving the label and the inner disk some gradients. |
Step 7:
Now with our usual techniques we give the disk a Shadow and Reflection. |
Finished Icon Image. |
Click here to download the finished icon. |
Tomorrow, we will do the much more useful 3" floppy disk. |
Montage-a-google... weird concept...
but fun nonetheless
Thursday, April 28, 2005 by historyishere | Discussion: Google
While I do believe the searches are safe(the "adult" filter is on), there is still the possibility that something naughty could pop up in your montage, but I doubt that it would.
In preparation for this article, I decided to see what the picture would look like if I used the search term "JoeUser" and the following was produced.
which upon looking at it, I see a lot of content that I am familiar with from the past.
And then, I tried the search term "SPMBT", because I wanted to see what would pop up... and was pleasantly surprised to see a few pictures from my own article about the game pop up as part of the mosaic.
I think the thing that I really liked about this whole process was that you can go right to one of the individual pictures if something interesting comes up(as all the pictures are also links) , and you can find out if it was something that you yourself posted or created.
So try it out and if you get something weird or interesting as part of the process, I'd love to hear about the search term or see a picture of what came up. I just hope I don't end up killing the site by posting it here.
Icon-A-Day, Icon # 81, Search
Time to start tieing up the lose ends.
Wednesday, April 27, 2005 by mormegil | Discussion: Icons
Icon 81 (Search) Tonight we can finish off another lose end. The start menu is mostly done, however I seem to have skipped the Search icon. I always like to try and come up with something clever when doing these, but when it comes to Search, I never can. I almost always end up doing a Magnifying glass. The only thing I can think of to do to make these match the rest of the icons is to make sure the colors match, as well as the perspective. | ||
Step 1: First we will start with a few squares and circles. I Rotate them a bit, and group them. |
Step 2:
Now we take our group that we just made and slant it back with the Perspective tool. |
Step 3a: Once I have a perspective I like, I ungroup the top of the glass, and do some Copying and Trimming to make a simple extrusion. |
Step 4:
Now with two mesh fills and a bit of gloss, I draw over our boxes to make a handle for the glass. |
Step 5: Now I use standard Gradients to make the upper part of the glass look like metal. |
Step 6: Now we place a new circle in the center of the head and using the interactive transparency tool I give it a radial transparency. |
Step 7:
Now we give the glass some glare. |
Step 8: Now using our standard reflection techniques we give the icon a reflection, |
Step 9: Last we have to give the icon a new shadow using our normal techniques as well. |
Finished Icon Image. |
Click here to download the finished icon. | |
I think that wraps up our Start Menu icons. This is also a good element that we may find more use for later. See you all tomorrow. |