Linux for Designers

Once i wrote a post about icon sets for Blender. One of these sets was made by Jendrzych and improved in the last two years. The newest version of his icon set is now the official icon set of Blender 2.5. You can get here now.

After creating a new splash for TORCS (using Blender and Gimp) i finished now a new Tango styled icon for TORCS. I enjoyed it again working with Inkscape:
How i did it:
* Set up the document (Shift+Ctrl+D) to 48x48px size
* Setup in the same dialogue the grid with 1px space
* Diplay the grid (View > Grid)
* Optional let the paths snap to the grid
* Now create/ design your icon but make sure everything used full pixel sizes/ positions
* Export the images as PNG (File > Bitmap export)

TORCS is available for Windows too and so i have to create a multiformat icon in the Windows ICO format too. Gimp make it possible to save images as the required format. The bad thing is that Gimp can't create multiformat icons (like Sibcodes plugin for Photoshop). Gimp didn't add resources it always replaces the full icon I created a bug report for Gimp 2.6.0.
Stupid me, GIMP can do!
Creating a multi-format Windows ICO with Gimp:
* Open the biggest icon PNG (in my case 48x48)
* drag all smaller resolutions into it
* If you like to create various color depths duplicate the layers often as needed (i duplicated them one time because i'd like to export 24bpp and 32bpp icons)
* Now save the layered image as an *.ico
* At save dialogue assign the color depth to any layer
* Save it, you will get an Ico file with various sizes and color depth

At TurboMilk, a Russian company for visual interface design, Denis Kortunov wrote an nice and well illustrated article about 10 typical mistakes in icon design.

To get your ideas in structures and viewable/understandable, you can use FreeMind or VYM View Your Mind. I prefer VYM for my Work, which is a KDE/QT app. So I'm started qt3config to tweak the GUI to fit in my Ubuntu style and created a complete Tango icon set for VYM based on Jimmac's nice work for OpenOffice.
To use the icon set overwrite the folder "flags" and "icons" in "/usr/share/vym/". I know i have to create a app icon too. Will coming soon.

DTP on Linux = Scribus. The 1.3.3.9 version of it is released . Mainly just bugfixes. The next real nice steps coming with the following 1.3.4.
I checked out the previous version which worked nice. But at the first look the GUI looks a little bit ugly (Scribus is based on QT) and so i created a Ubuntu color theme for it. To use it, copy it as root to "/etc/qt3/" or as normal user to "~/.qt3/". There is a "qt3-qtconfig" config tool too.

DTP on Linux means Scribus. A 1.3.3.8 version of it is released . Mainly bugfixes. The 1.3.3.9 version is on the run.
I talked to the developers about the tangofied version and they told me all that including real new stuff will come along with th 1.4 brunch so stay tuned

The upcoming 2.43 version of Blender has improved theme options too, one new is that you can customize now the icons.

Jimmac has painted lovely Tango icons:


and Jendrzych painted a more Blender look like theme that's quite cool too:


To use this icons you need a Blender 2.43 build

• create a folder "icons" in the ".blender folder"
• save the images above with right click "Save picture" and save them into the icons folder
• start Blender and select the "User Preferences" window (i)
• Click on the Theme Button and choose "UI and Buttons" int the first dropdown in the secound column
• After that select "Icon File" int the dropdpwn below and select the icon file of you choice
• Save the user preferences with "Ctrl+U" when you are back to the "3D View" window

I'm using Blender and the "BS Exporter for Blender" for creating realtime 3D content based on the officical standard X3D (successor of VRML). I was looking around for a native X3D viewer because Contact doesn't work with Wine yet.
So i found the Octaga Player for Linux which runs fine. There where just two things:

• Octaga Player has some ugly icons
• the Deb file didn't istall the Firefox plugin correct

The plugin problem of the Deb file where easy to fix just copy the files of
/usr/lib/octagaplayer -> /usr/lib/firefox/plugins
After a restart Firefox has a plugin for viewing VRML worlds and X3D scenes.

To fix the ugly icons i changed the default ones the shipped with the Octaga Player and created some based on Tango/ Tangerine icons.

Just download the Octaga Player theme and copy all files as root into
/usr/share/octagaplayer/Resources/Images
Overwrite all existing files - that's it

I didn't test FreeWRL or OpenVRML yet, but will do this soon.

I started creating icons in the Tango look for files of commercial apps. Here is my first step (Flash source *.fla and Flash ActionScript *.as) dancing tango with Inkscape