Ahem....



Now that the great ICON debate has reached a feverish pitch, I feel 

compelled tothrow a few dozen your way. 



It seems sad that no one can agree upon a standard. Well, an intelligent, 

well-designed and efficient one that doesn't look like it was salvaged from 

the dumpster outside of Hanna-Barbera.  I've seen icons that run the 

gamut from sublime but ridiculous to the gaudy and insipid. I suppose that's 

what happens when you open the door to 640 x 200 pixel icon possibilities.



Now, we have WB 2.xx.  Difficult to believe that somewhere in the vast 

populous of dog-excrement which passes for Corporate Management at 

Commode-Door, someone WAS ALLOWED the foresight to limit the Icon 

Editor to 80 x 40 pixels. There IS a God.



Coming from a background in computer illustration and graphic design, 

I have hadthe good fortune, over these last many years, to work on industry 

standards such as Silicon Graphics Systems (even the Personal IRIS - I'm still 

waiting for an apology from SG for that miscarriage of technology, but would 

do ANYTHING to have one of their printers), Symbolics (fairly well behaved), 

ArtStar Systems (Sort of the "Timex Sinclair" of graphic workhorses), and Apollo 

(quite dependable). As Graphic User Interfaces flourished throughout these systems 

(Thank you XEROX Corp.), a plethora of icon design standard were heaped upon the (sometimes unwilling) end users.  Although I do not care for the direction that 

Silicon Graphics is taking at this juncture (please, spend 10 minutes on an INDIGO), 

their concept of of the GUI has always seemed to be a notch above the rest. 



Since my first purchase of an AMIGA some 6 or so years ago (yes, at one time I even

owned a MINDSET computer- Oh, Lord...) I have been trying to come to some 

acceptable point on what it would take for my icons to make me happy. I was 

recently intrigued by KensIcons (Fred Fish #546) which were designed from the 

SiliconGraphics standpoint. Since I have been designing 8-color icons around the 

SG look for some time (thanks to the WBDepth hack), I decided to check them out.  

For the most part, they were quite rewarding. I was amused to find that there was 

someone else who looked upon the current crop of Icons as hideous leviathans 

unleashed upon an unsuspecting public. However, they were just too small to be 

of any use to me (since Commode-Door insists on using as many characters as 

possible in a filename, this left the windows with a rather spaced and "toothy" look 

when using very small icons. 



I also use a 16 (4-bit) color WB. If you've got it, flaunt it. With an `030 

running at 33 mhz and several hacks like CPU blit (and the CPU command which 

moves vectors into better neighborhoods), my WB still outperforms it's 1.3 counterpart

with lots of windows open. As I spend my days now working free-lance in the art 

department of a MAJOR computer superstore (please, no names...) I am constantly 

amazed at what people will put up with from Apple, IBM, and Bill Gates and his memory-hungry cronies. In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, "What maroons..."



Let The Show Begin...



In order to see these icons as they were designed, you will have to reset your 

palette to the one included in this archive. If you don't know how, buy a Macintosh 

and let Apple decide what your setup will look like. Or perhaps IBM (funny, but I B M 

is what my nephew says when he emerges from the bathroom...), and thrill to the joy 

of dealing with the Program Manager (I didn't care for the "easter-egg", either.)





I have attempted to cull the redundant icons out of this collection (most of my paint

programs use the DPaintIV icon, with some modification of color, etc....), and I have

a TON of audio and music icons which I have not included, since there seems to be a 

lot of folks who prefer to design these themselves (??? beats me!!!!) If you really want

them, just cough up a big HOCK TUEY in my direction via GEnie mail (address 

R. McVey) and I'll pack'em and pipe'em. This collection also includes some 

photo-realistic icons which I use in my 3D partition (they really blow Mac Users 

away). They are larger than "normal", but everytime I see those sloped-brow PC 

user's tongues hit the floor when they see them, I always decide to keep them 

around a little while longer. You will also have to change the flag on

the hard drive partition icons from drawer to disk. (I changed them

so you could see them in the drawer.)



Hasta la vista del sol'o'mia



C'est la vie dans Afrique, enfante...





R.McVey