Application Icons

As mentioned previously, I'm going to add a gui to gnugo, the textshell being an inappropriate way to interface on a mobile phone.

That means putting it in the applicaiton shell, and that means having an icon. Luckily for me, and my mediocre artistic skills, GNU Go already has one.

Here is GNU Go in the applicaiton menu. The icons in S60 3.0 is an SVG. GNU Go doesn't actually have such an SVG in it's package, so I was wondering what to do. Perhaps just create a dummy icon in Inkscape? No good, Inkscape doesn't seem to be able to generate the SVGT needed by the S60 mifconv.exe tool, and even if you somehow make one that is parsable, it looks bad. If you can see it at all that is.

What I should do, of course, is run it through the SVG to SVGT converter that ships with the SDK. Well, that's what I would do, if I could install the damn thing, but it flat out refuses to install. It keeps insisting that I have the wrong version of Java installed, no matter how many JRE's I install or uninstall. I spent many hours trying to get that to work all to no avail. I chickened out at manually going and deleting every reference to Java in the registry, so the converter remains uninstalled. "Write once, run anywhere" indeed.

Luckily all is not lost, as you can tell from the nice SVG displayed in the picture. Turns out there is a pretty nice application called potrace that takes a bitmap as input and then does a kind of freehand drawing of what it sees, and outputs the result to the vector format of your choice. The SVG it generates seems to work fine with mifconv.exe. So, I feed in the existing GNU Go logo bitmap, potrace outputs a nice SVG of it. Problem solved.

The resulting SVG looks quite nice in my opinion. It's not exactly the same, since the input is a fairly low resolution bitmap, but the smooth SVG is none the worse for the minor differences in my opinion.

Anyway, this icon thing was pretty much the first thing I did once I had got the GUI past the "Hello Cruel Symbian World" stage. I always think it's a shame when you install some application and it puts that default jigsaw piece icon there. It spoils the "total user experience" :-)