Re: son of X-Face:

Cameron Simpson (cameron@cs.unsw.oz.au)
Tue, 17 Aug 93 14:17:37 +1000

Jamie (I think) wrote:
| I think restricting the image size so arbitrarily is a bad idea; 48x48 is
| really tiny! All of my other icons are 64x64, and they just don't look all
| that large. The same people who want color today will want bigger tomorrow.

I wrote:
| I used to think this way too, but it uses up so much screen real estate.

Jamie Zawinski <jwz@lucid.com> writes:
| But that's the point: as DPI goes up, the icons get *smaller*. They don't
| take up more mm on the glass, they just shrink. Bigger pixel counts don't
| translate to more screen real estate over time, they just translate to better
| image quality.

Truely, as DPI goes up, actual size goes down, but DPI doesn't go up very fast.
I have had a 1280x1024 1 bit screen for the past 4 years and

- I use twm, whose _major_ attraction for me is the Icon Mangler
which gives me a popup menu of window names rather than icons,
which consume much space
- I have turfed all my window borders and titles (I think they
clutter things)
- my root window access is a 3 pixel strip across the top of the screen
(easy to aim at, just slam!-click)
- the next 100 pixels down is a console window and faces and xloads
and a clock
- the bottom 900 pixels is vertically split into two windows; a shell
and an editor
- I still don't think I have enough screen real estate. I want
manuals off to the right and a browser to the left and a calendar
above and ...

This is on an HP/Apollo. One of these days I'll migrate to a Solaris box I
expect (mostly for the grunt). I suspect I'll have to squeeze into an 1152x900
screen for that. Ouch.

My point is that high res screens are still very expensive (high res colour
extremely expensive) and I don't see 2560x2048 pixel screens coming any time
soon. (But I want, I really do, 2x the current res and 1.5x the current DPI).

I agree that more DPI means better image quality, but we're not getting more
DPI. DPIwise my screen is still more or less top-of-the-line for desktop
machines (barring pure full-on graphics workstations) as it was 4 years ago.

| > - the images rapidly get too big to pump around as mail headers.
| > I fear the day when the headers outweigh the message text by orders
| > of magnitude.
|
| They don't get big unless you make them big. If someone doesn't want their
| headers to swell, then they'll just use a 48x48 image, right?

In a multimedia environment people won't even consider it. But those of us
outside such an environment have to deal with the fallout.

| > | I think a good approach might be to use the XPM3 format as the baseline,
| > Where could one find the spec for this?
| export.lcs.mit.edu: contrib/xpm3.2g.tar.Z or something close to that.
| I think a slightly older version also comes with X11R5. The pbmplus
| toolkit can convert to xpm too.

Thanks, I'll go look.
- Cameron Simpson
cameron@cse.unsw.edu.au, DoD#743

--
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