Due to the great feedback that I am getting I wanted to solicit Ideas from other members.

The current version of the icon editor can be found here in the CR.

An alternate icon editor that LAVA members prefer was created by ThSa on the NI forums (Dark side) and can be found Here

JDav's icon editor is Here

The RUAG icon editor is Here in the CR

If anyone has links to other icon editors that they use please post a link to them in this thread.

I would like to collectively work on features to improve the icon editor.

Initial thoughts:

The Icon editor was not intended to do anything with graphics. So it will take some rearchitecting or creative thinking to add them to the program.

The ability to take the icon and break it down into its text, frame, and color components is a very important function to me and adding graphics greatly complicates this.

as a starter I like the idea of having selectable frames and maybe we could place a glyph in the corner only.

All Ideas are welcome.

Here are my though on this topic.

In order to be widely use, a new icon editor has to implement all existing functionalities of the NI icon editor with a very similar UI. Any additional functionalities (such as Mark Text editing capabilities or such as ThSa quick glyph dropping, or any other) should be added on top.
UI wize there are a lot of way of doing this. What makes it quite an undertaking is that the NI icon editor has a lot of functionalities to start with (all the key modifier on all the tools etc..).

PJM

I posted an Icon Editor that plays with both text and graphics. It is quite well developed, but tuned to my liking... I really like the idea of coming up with the LAVA Icon Editor. That would be very cool. I would love to help out with that!!

Regarding PJM's comment, I had not really considered (ever) mimicking the NI Icon Editor functionality because I wanted to avoid completely all that pixel manipulation when I create my icons. However, I can understand his point that to be widely accepted it has to at least feel comfortable at first glance and while using it.

Philippe, were you envisioning keeping the ability to individually edit each of the three icons (B&W,16,256) ? Would there be any problem with just applying the 256 Color icon to the other two?

Dave,

I like what you did with your icon editor. The UIs are great although I have to confess that I am having a hard time figuring out what some of the toolbar button do.

In regard to a LAVA Icon editor. I think we could probably get away with editing only the 256 color icon (although there are some use case where editing each one independently is required).

I start working on such an icon editor about 6 years ago and I even made a doc about all the NI icon editor functionalities. I will see if I can find what I had (so far no success).

The reason why I think duplicating NI Icon functionalities is a must is that every time I use a custom editor I end up CTRL+. because it does not do something I need to do (ex: copy image from clipboard and more) which end up being more time comsuming than just using NI icon editor in the first place.

PJM

I hate making icons! I only use text on my icons. I would like to be able to type some text and it gets translated to tiny fonts and auto-fit into multiple lines. Can someone add this? Also, I think it would be awesome to combine all the features into one super LAVA icon editor. Super in functionality however simple and intuitive to use. There is the challenge. Adding features is easy, making them obvious and intuitive is the tough part.

I will post an image with descriptions on those buttons.

What would be the use cases for editing each one independently?

If you had a document on those NI functions, that would be great !

It would probably be worthwhile to amass a list of desired functionalities (like copying from the clipboard). The solution currently for my implementation is to save that image to the correct image folder and then it would show up in the image search. Though I had considered adding a functionality for importing an image into my 'library'. It wouldn't be hard to extend that to include importing the image currently in the clipboard. I definitely agree that if the user has an image in the clipboard, they should be able to paste that onto the icon somehow. Ctrl-v should work.


I configured my editor to translate/parse the filename to tiny fonts and auto-fit into multiple lines. That way I only have to name the VI once. I don't know if that is quite what you are asking for. Are you thinking more of a single string control to type into?

Here's my submission - crelf's minifont:

Here is the screenshot of what I was attempting to do several years ago (this was at a very early stage).



The document below is (if I recall properly) a list of the feature I found in the NI icon editor (which I was thinking to implement in the custom Icon editor).

 Object.doc ( 56.5K ) Number of downloads: 65


PJM

And here it is as an installable ttf (I added numbers and a couple special chars).

 crelfsmini.zip ( 2.88K ) Number of downloads: 25


I found this really fun site where you can quickly generate your own fonts online and save them as a ttf file. Then simply install the font to make it available in any program.

The only downside is that if you try to change the font size to anything other than 10pt in LabVIEW it crashes hard:

In some instance for some type of icon (that are render blank in the B&W icon), you get the following LabVIEW error message.



If you want to keep your 256 color icon intact, then the only way around this is to edit the B&W icon separately.

PJM

What do you mean by tiny does that mean LabVIEW icon 10 point lower case or LabVIEW 8 point. Isn't it hard enough to read the current compressd letters



How is this different then how the icon editor works now



I like the Idea but I'm not sure a one size fits all aproach is the answer. It seems pretty obvious that everyone wants different features.
I think a plugin archatecture might be a better fit here.