Posted on July 12, 2009 - by jono
Icon Theme Hacking Progress
Quick update on my icon hacking. I have now figured out a way to get most of my notification icons to have broadly the right color. It used to look like this:
Now it looks like this:
To do this I first copied my Human icon, edited theme.index to change the name of the theme and then went around coloring icons. Thanks to d0od for pointing me at the Meliae White theme too. I used some of those icons in my own cobbled together theme.
To do the coloring I took a screenshot and use the GIMP’s eye-dropper to get the shade of grey to color the icons. For my Dust theme this is:
- Hue: 45
- Saturation: 10
- Lightness: 6
I then colored each notification icon with the GIMP Coloize tool (Colors->Colorize) using these values.
I am going to make a few other changes and then I will put together my theme online.
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July 12, 2009
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We’ll be waiting for the theme.. Ubuntu rock!
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July 12, 2009
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At first I didn’t know what you were asking for, but then I looked at my Mac and figured out what you meant. Looking at these icons I can totally see how they’d make the panel slick. I’ll look forward to seeing the finished set.
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July 12, 2009
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Isn’t that the OS X wifi icon?
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July 12, 2009
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As it stands though, the single best thing that could happen to my notification area would be if Rhythmbox didn’t show up there. ..I hope Banshee is more well behaved in that regard.
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July 12, 2009
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Hey, Jono, I’ve been wanting to make a completely greyscale icon theme for a while now, but I didn’t really want to do it by myself. I assume you’re planning on opening this up once you release it… would you be wanting to make a full theme, or just the notification icons? And would you welcome help? ;p
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July 12, 2009
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Does this affect the menu and tasklist icons also, or just the notification tray?
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July 12, 2009
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The problem you have just editing the icon’s color in the theme, is that the grayscaled icon will be used everywhere it is needed, and not just in the notification area. It would be needed to have the notification area to use use a specific subset of the theme, with different specs. Also, using just that colors, your icons would not work on a light background, you should put a dark border around the shapes.
btw, in an average system there are way too much icons sitting all the time in the notification area, we should get rid of them in some way.
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July 12, 2009
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index.theme, not theme.index
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July 12, 2009
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Like James’s question: There is no separation of the icons for purpose, right? Just size? So it’s hard to replace just the notification icons in a theme.
I think it’s a really good goal though.
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July 12, 2009
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“To do the coloring I took a screenshot and use the GIMP’s eye-dropper to get the shade of grey to color the icons.”
Quick GIMP tip: You don’t have to take a screenshot in order to pick a colour that is displayed somewhere on your screen. Just use the eyedropper from the colour dialog. http://hubpages.com/hub/Mixing-Colors-Using-the-Gimp
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July 12, 2009
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Why you don’t use Phatch (sudo apt-get install phatch) to batch process the colorize action? It is a nice application with a user friendly GUI. You can choose the colorize action if you select the colors category (up right) in the add actions dialog box. This will save you much time.
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July 12, 2009
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looks pretty cool, can I be notified when its published online ?
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July 12, 2009
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Interesting. But I find the battery icon shitty… I don’t need to see a plug on it.. I want to see the bars directly. Second icon I don’t like is the pidgin one.
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July 12, 2009
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You wanted a Mac OS X like thing and this is what you got?
Epic FAIL!
Icons don’t need to be just recolored, most of them also need to be redrawn.
Maybe one can snetch some from Moblin?
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July 12, 2009
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This is the first time i enjoy a dark theme on Ubuntu (New Wave) and i believe the colored icons doesnt bother at all. I dunno why the OsX icons are all black and white but for people like my mom they turn out to be a little confusing.
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July 12, 2009
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I’ve had the same qualms about the panel look for a long time and after reading your post yesterday I decided I’d try to hack it out. This is new territory for me since I’ve never dabbled in GTK but after nitpicking at the gnome panels code I had what I thought was a solution after hacking away at button-widget.c’s button_widget_reload_pixbuf method but it turned out to only affect the launcher icons; I sure was naive
I journeyed some more and discovered that notification area applets used GtkStatusIcon (libgtk) and so began another hack job to its gtk_status_icon_update_image method.
This is where I stand now http://www.openzenergy.com/photos/gnome-panel.png As you can see I’ve still to discover how the volume and clock applet set their notification icons.
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July 12, 2009
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I really like these icons.
Are these icons part of ubuntu/kubuntu karmic koala?
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July 13, 2009
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I like those icons. I wonder if they could be added to the high-contrast theme. The current icon set there is very limited, and this would make it awesome.
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July 13, 2009
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Can we make this the “bacon theme”?
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July 13, 2009
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Authors using the notification area.. do they normally set the icon using a pixbuf or do they normally set using a name from an icon theme?
In the second case, it’s pretty easy, just patch the notification area to first look for “icon-name-notification” then for “icon-name”; THEN we can speak business and start replacing icons on the default desktop!
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July 13, 2009
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What are the £ and € buttons for? Is that a currency conversion applet, or is it because you have a US keyboard without £ and € keys?
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July 13, 2009
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It’s looking great! Also, I just wanted to say I really enjoy hearing your input and knowledge in the FLOSS Weekly podcast. Keep up the great work!
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July 13, 2009
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KDE developer just blocked about this: http://www.notmart.org/index.php/BlaBla/Pretty_systray_not_just_about
This may be possible with new to-be-hopefully-freedesktop-org-specification. I keep my fingers crossed
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July 14, 2009
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http://www.notmart.org/index.php/BlaBla/Pretty_systray_not_just_about
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July 15, 2009
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http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/
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July 17, 2009
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Looks awesome when will it land in karmic? (Im using karmic already)