Icons are tough
I spent an hour or two working on some sort of icon for Mercurial beyond the scribbles that I had originally used. I finally settled on an icon much like the standard Windows XP Icons. Following (sort of) the steps from here, I decided on two application windows stacked on top of each other. It symbolizes what Mercurial does reasonably well, and looks clean. I wasn’t sure about getting the perspective stuff working properly, but after a little bit of tracing I had some lines to follow. From there it was just getting an application screenshot (I used notepad), tracing outlines, filling with colors and lots of resizing. Creating Windows XP icons isn’t too bad, although the instructions I linked to aren’t the best I’ve ever seen.
Either way, here’s what I ended up with. It looks pretty good on the desktop but the system tray version suffers a little bit. I need to figure out how to clean up the edges some, but that really isn’t all that many pixels. Definitely not a high priority.
Here’s what I accomplished today:
- New Icon, it’s much prettier
- Created TitlePicker dialog, used when renaming notes or creating new ones without using a link
- Ability to rename notes
- Made settings + titlePicker more like dialogs
- DID I MENTION A NEW ICON?!?
- Deleting a note makes sure that there is a backup first
- code cleanup around renaming/deleting, since a lot of that can be shared
- Double-Clicking systray icon now creates a new note
- If note is not changed and closed the saving step will be skipped
And here’s my revised to-do list:
- Context Menu Item to show all notes on screen at once?
- Make settings changes apply to all open notes
- More testing of link insertion code, appears to still be a little wonky
- try to track down slight flashing bug. I still don’t know what is casing that…
- Some sort of note browser that allows for viewing all notes and choosing which to open
- searching titles + text of notes
- plugin system
March 28th, 2005 7 Comments »
