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Hey ActionPack, great look on the icons!

One minor suggestion, if you don't mind? Try to make the Outlook icon back to the old color of yellowish-orange.

I think MS went overboard with all the blue. Word and Visio is enough.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151231515125984&set=o.178191330369&type=1&relevant_count=1

Above is a link to the Office 2013 page. I post it there. I want to get a lot of comments on this and see if Microsoft would say something about this!

  • 3 weeks later...

Was not talking about the Metro but the desktop itself. I truly believe that the desktop does not need to go into Metro looking.

I think it does need to go metro or it looks funny switching between the two... consistency is broken. I am replacing all the 'retro' icons with 'metro' icons (where I can) on my server 2012 install. It drives me nuts seeing the old icons in metro look.

They need to get rid of the old icons... kid you not there's windows 98 era icons in there.

It's wierd using office 2013 in windows 7 becuase the visual styling clashes so much.... It would be too much work to get 7 to blend in so I deal with it. I will switch to 2012 full time soon. For now I have it in a VM to play with.

They do look very nice. Your mock-up is leading me to seriously think hard about whether the lack of gradients, shadows etc. in most "Metro" products is really a good approach or not.

I agree becuase for some things it does screwy things with my eyes.... might be too much skooma though... LOL...

I like them all :)

I've got a few qualms, though. I don't like how the letters follow the perspective of the icon, and I don't think they'd scale very well.

On the former:

  • Reminds me of how the Windows "flag" follows the perspective on the Store bag icon. It's just off-putting. In the bag case, it implies that the window icon should actually be presented as a straight-forward looking flat icon, not in perspective.
  • At smaller sizes, they would look odd. Perhaps the smaller icons would show the letters as flat, and the larger ones could have them slanted as they are now in your design.

On the latter:

  • In most cases, these icons will be seen most often on the taskbar or pinned to Start. As such, they will be scaled down, probably to about 32x32. At this point, most of the cosmetic changes you've made are no longer visible.

Prove me wrong, please; I want to see it :)

The "light source" completely contradicts the shadows.

Take for example the shadow on the top left of the O logo. The light would be coming from north-east location, whereas the shadow on the bottom right has a south-east location. But the "light source" for the south-east shadow doesn't cast a shadow on the top right of the O. And the gradient on the right part of the O is backwards. If there were a light, casting a shadow like the one seen in the bottom right, it would either be flat, or the gradient would be light-to-dark, not dark-to-light.

As for the other icons, based on their shadows, the bottom right half would be brighter rather than the top left half. The angle of the shadow would imply a light source be closer to the right as its shadow's angle is much smaller. If the light source was where the square's lighting would imply, being more to the left and higher, then the shadow would have a wider angle from the viewers perspective and be cast slightly lower. Though you modified these in a later post, so you can ignore this.

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    • @Sayan...I have defended you at various points as I hope you know. This headline however is utter trash...shame on you sir!
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It is also associated with one of the strongest peaks in IceCube's nine-year neutrino sky map A blazar is a type of active galactic nucleus powered by a supermassive black hole that pulls in surrounding matter and launches jets of plasma moving close to the speed of light. What makes blazars unique is their orientation. One of their jets points almost directly toward Earth, making them appear exceptionally bright across the electromagnetic spectrum and allowing scientists to study some of the most extreme physical processes in the Universe. The scientists exclaimed it's like the 'Eye of Sauron' in deep space. Usually, the brightest gamma-ray-emitting blazars are expected to have jets that appear to move very quickly. However, radio observations of PKS 1424+240 suggested that its jet was moving much more slowly, creating a contradiction that became part of a long-running problem known as the "Doppler factor crisis." To investigate, researchers analyzed 15 years of observations from the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a network of 10 radio antennas spread across the continental United States, Hawaii and St. Croix. Using a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), astronomers combine signals from widely separated radio telescopes to create a virtual Earth-sized telescope capable of revealing extremely fine details. The team combined 42 polarization-sensitive radio images collected between 2009 and 2025, creating a much deeper and more detailed view of the jet than had previously been possible. The observations were carried out as part of MOJAVE (Monitoring Of Jets in Active galactic nuclei with VLBA Experiments), a long-running program that studies the brightness, polarization and magnetic field structures of jets produced by active galaxies. The project aims to better understand how activity near supermassive black holes is linked to high-energy radiation and neutrino emission. “When we reconstructed the image, it looked absolutely stunning,” said Yuri Kovalev, lead author of the study and Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded MuSES project at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. “We have never seen anything quite like it — a near-perfect toroidal magnetic field with a jet, pointing straight at us.” The image revealed an unusual geometry. The researchers found that Earth lies almost directly in line with the jet, with a viewing angle of less than 0.6 degrees. In simple terms, astronomers are looking almost straight down the jet. This turned out to be the key to the mystery. Because the jet is aimed almost directly at Earth, a relativistic effect called Doppler boosting dramatically increases its apparent brightness. The study found that this effect boosts the emission by a factor of about 30 while also making the jet appear slower than it actually is. “This alignment causes a boost in brightness by a factor of 30 or more,” said Jack Livingston, a co-author at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. “At the same time, the jet appears to move slowly due to projection effects — a classic optical illusion.” The nearly head-on view also gave scientists a rare look at the jet's magnetic field. Using polarized radio signals, they detected a clear toroidal, or doughnut-shaped, magnetic field component. The observations suggest the jet carries an electric current and that its magnetic field helps launch, shape and stabilize the flow of plasma. 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    • Gotenks98 is right... Outlook (new) is absolute trash. Doesn't Mozilla have an Enterprise Version of Firebird?
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