Notes on RISC OS 3.xx window icons
==================================

I am going to have a machine with RISC OS 3.10 in it in less than 2 months now, and I have seen Acorns default (2d) icons (passable, but boring), and Roger
Wilson's 3d (passable, but not nice enough) icon sets, and, quite frankly, I
want my desktop to look *good*, not *mediocre*.

Three steps are necessary:
 1) Nice icons for the window borders scrollbars, etc,
 2) Replace system font with an outline font of the user's choice,
 3) Convince all application authors to include an option for 3-d windows (well
    designed ones, preferably) and outline fonts in their applications.

Now, I can't do much about 3, and I don't have time to do anything about 2,
so the result is I've done something about 1!

In this archive there are 3 sprite files:
  3d20-NeXT    Icon set based upon the lok of the NeXT interface.
               (These are insode the !Run Me application directory)

  Sausage?     Some icons from the above file.
               I have made the scrollbar "sausage" caps bigger in the hope that
               RISC OS 3.10 will do the right thing, and leave the
               scroll-sausages as squares as their minimum size. Squitty
               little 1-pixel-high scroll sausages are ugly and hard to grab
               hold of.

  NeXT Windo   An example Task Manager window, showing how these icons should
               make windows look... Mainly included for RISC OS 2.00 owners
               like myself who can't otherwise see the effect...

  Others       My first attempts at editing Roger Wilson's 3d icon set.
               I'm sure they won't work nicely, but you can pull out any of the
               icons that you like from the file, if you lie any of them...

Please note that I don't have RISC OS 3.xx yet, so I am not entirely sure that
everything is completely correct.

Note also that Acorn, although doing a good job on letting us use real sprites
for these icons, didn't plan for people like myself who want to treat the
title-bar as a single entity rather than 4 icons (back, close, title, fullsize)
The results of this are:
  * When selected as the input focus, things look a little tacky.
  * The nice 'dimples' in the scrollbars of the example window picture are
    not actually quite possible to achieve with Acorn's current plotting
    strategy, so I was forced to remove them.
  * Windows that don't have a back and/or fullsize icon will lose part of the
    titlebar plinth. This is hardly noticable though.

As soon as I get a RISC OS 3.10 machine, I will also try to do something about
the awful blue arrows Acorn seem to have adopted (in RISC OS 3.00).

Please note that these icons are designed in mode 20. If you don't live in
high-res screen modes, then you will need to redesign a set for mode 12 (or
mode 23) if you want the best results...


Usage
=====

Oh, yeah... I suppose I should mention what you should *do* with the sprites!

Well, I haven't been able to test this, but try running the !Run Me app in
this archive... it should do the trick...


Conditions etc.
===============

These icons are FreeWare.
You can do whatever you like with them so long as you don't make any profit,
and you don't claim that you drew them. If your organisation is called
"Acorn Computers" then feel free to burn them into ROM in your next
operating-system release ;-)

Jason Williams
