On Tue, 17 Apr 2001, Scott Wallace wrote:

> At 5:42 PM +1200 4/18/01, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
> 
> >I've spent some time poking around trying to figure out where the
> >"icons" are held.  What should I do to replace these pictures with ones
> >the same size and same predominant colour, but with strongly contrasting
> >capital letters inside?
> 
> [many ways to draw icons]

The easiest way to find out the icon names is:

1. World menu > do... > ScriptingSystem inspectFormDict
2. Click on "find..." in the menu left to the "Prev" button.
3. type in "Halo"
4. Accept
5. Use Prev/Next to see the other halo icons.

Once you know which icon you want to repaint, do:

	(ScriptingSystem formAtKey: 'Halo-Debug') bitEdit

When you're done editing, choose "accept" from the red halo handle. Now
you have a new icon.

Regarding your icon art-critique: I wont get into a discussion about the
pictorial nature of icons. But perhaps it is helpful to know the
reasoning how I came up with these symbols (based on an idea by Dave
Smith).

The halo is for manipulating morphs. The morph is represented by a little
quadrangle. It's so small to make it fit into the circular handles.
Picking up a morph takes it out of its owner, so that is why the big crane
takes the quad between its pliers and moves it up. Moving a morph is
suggested by four arrows in diagonal directions - there was no room to
make bigger arrows. Duplicating a morph is visualized by an analogy: in
biology, cells are replicated by segmentation, and this icon shows two
morphs not quite finished separating. The "scaling" icon shows the morph
once at original size, once at a slightly larger size. Rotation is
indicated by speedlines (taken from comic visual language) - there was no
room to place little arrows here.

The rest of the icons do not quite fit into that scheme. Close and
collapse are denoted by crosses and circles throughout the system. The
viewer icon is an eye, the tile icon a rectangle - I just hadn't any
better idea here. The menu icon is a simplified menu. Recolor icon is a
pipette, repaint a pen. For debugging, a wrench was something I associate
with disassembling things, looking into how they work, so I settled to
that (I tried painting a bug but it was not recognizable). The three font
icons show the same one letter in pairs of different styles, like
bold/italic, serif/sans, small/large. The help icon is a question mark.

A valid point is the low contrast of some handles. This is historical, I
chose the threshold in Color>>makeForegroundColor to use black on red
because this was the original color before I added the automatic color
adjustment (like, the rotate handle's color switches from white to black).
We should raise the threshold to 0.5 there.

-- Bert