[Shell Patcher] Tango Icons for Windows


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I also tried the tango icons on my last install, but I couldn't get used to the icons. Personaly I found them of very bad design, mostly the small icons.

1. A lot of icons where not recognisable when small.

2. Some icons didn't make sense. (could have been my expectation by using windows icons for so long, but I used tango icons for 1 month and still wasn't used to them)

I think these are not my icons, i found them worse than the current winXP icons. Maybe they need some more maturing for my taste :)

No need to start a flamewar on my account :rofl:

Some random streams of consciousness:

  • It took me more than a month to adjust from the win95>IE4>win2k icons to XP (and I'm still fighting that one :rolleyes: ). And those share a genealogy. Tango traces its descent mainly from Gnome and KDE with little bits of Aqua here and there; if you didn't like them, you probably won't like Tango either.
  • I'm not the guy who makes the bulk of the icons, or defined the style (the only Tango icons I've made are miscellaneous things that only appear in this shell patching toy thing). I'd point you towards the official project mailing list or bugzilla, but I hate to see a guy get pwnz3d by Real Icon Designers. It's happened to me, it hurts :pinch:
  • ... but it is rather funny that you say the smaller icon sizes are unrecognizable. Having sharp, recognizable icons at smaller sizes is one of the explicit goals of the Tango style guidelines. :unsure:

No need to start a flamewar on my account :rofl:

Some random streams of conciousness:

  • It took me more than a month to adjust from the win95>IE4>win2k icons to XP (and I'm still fighting that one :rolleyes: ). And those share a genealogy. Tango traces its descent mainly from Gnome and KDE with little bits of Aqua here and there; if you didn't like them, you probably won't like Tango either.
  • I'm not the guy who makes the bulk of the icons, or defined the style (the only Tango icons I've made are miscellaneous things that only appear in this shell patching toy thing). I'd point you towards the official project mailing list or bugzilla, but I hate to see a guy get pwnz3d by Real Icon Designers. It's happened to me, it hurts :pinch:
  • ... but it is rather funny that you say the smaller icon sizes are unrecognizable. Having sharp, recognizable icons at smaller sizes is one of the explicit goals of the Tango style guidelines. :unsure:

Dont worry verg, I'm sure he was born without eyes or he sees everything like this: :rofl:

First of all, thanks for a great icon pack, all installs/updates have worked perfectly for me.

In case you wanted, here are the links to the Opera tango skins for you to add to the first post:

Tango CL (non-native): http://my.opera.com/community/customize/skins/info/?id=3465

Tango native (native): http://my.opera.com/community/customize/skins/info/?id=3585

First of all, thanks for a great icon pack, all installs/updates have worked perfectly for me.

In case you wanted, here are the links to the Opera tango skins for you to add to the first post:

Tango CL (non-native): http://my.opera.com/community/customize/skins/info/?id=3465

Tango native (native): http://my.opera.com/community/customize/skins/info/?id=3585

Thanks, added

For all the various post-0.7.2c updates (brighter network status lights, proper size arrangement for Tango's lock-screen icon, and the k3b / burning icon): http://darkt.net/pic/Tango_0pt7pt2c+1.zip. It'll be a bit before I have anything worthy of a Big Update (haven't been inspired to go on any random resource-replacing sprees lately, been busy, etc), so I figure I'll throw it up as a little mini-update since the network lights have been a complaint for a good long while now. Extract to the same place you have the patcher, and repatch (with the usual optional restoring somewhere in there, if you prefer to keep the original files around). I don't want to put down a date, but I have talked to XPero recently, and Tango will be borrowing his installer code :cool: - that'll probably be the next big release.

Work on my LogonUI progressed up to a point, but I've kinda hit a brick wall. The LogonUI-reading engine isn't that flexible in some ways, and I'm having a hard time getting it to work quite right - icky black boxes if I try to get rid of the icky blue boxes :/

ickyblackbox.png

I don't want to put down a date, but I have talked to XPero recently, and Tango will be borrowing his installer code :cool: - that'll probably be the next big release.

Great news and thanks for the update. I'm glad there is no need for the dos prog anymore since I'm having a problem with the ENV variable and no time...

I might do a bootscreen eventually, but I need some design inspiration. And I'd probably do it as a skin for Stardock's Bootskin, since otherwise I'd need to be doing location-specific hex editing at various places in different versions of ntoskrnl to change the color palette (and I would be changing the color palette)... and I don't like doing that on my own machine.

Thanks for the mini update! And the logonui is looking good. "turn off the easy bake oven"; just made me chuckle. lol
Yeah, my present machine is a Shuttle SFF. My mother said it looked like a toaster, so I started calling it the easy bake oven, and the name stuck :laugh:

Yeah, my present machine is a Shuttle SFF. My mother said it looked like a toaster, so I started calling it the easy bake oven, and the name stuck :laugh:

:laugh:

Stardocks bootskin is nice.. but I actually prefer not to use 3rd party programs-if I don't have to. That's just me though.

...and I don't like doing that on my own machine.

I guess that comment needs some 'splainin. The palette for the image is stored in the kernel, at a location other than the resource area (where the bitmap images are), presumably to achieve the "fade-in" effect, and has to be changed by something like a hex editor. Of course, the offsets are different for all the various versions of the kernel (depending on whether you're running XP SP0/1/2, whichever hotfix introduced the "xpsp_sp2_gdr" tag, Win2003 - which is supported by the patcher, etc) and it's just a nasty mess (unlike in Win2000, where you could just reshack a single bitmap, pretty much). Stardock likes to make shell patching tools sound more dangerous than they are (which, of course, they are), but hex editing the kernel is one of the times I tend to agree with them (resource hacking is relatively safe, as it transparently updates the addresses in the binary). It's the kind of nasty mess I wouldn't typically install on my own machine, and I'm not going to do things I don't find reliable on my own machine... on other people's machines. Of course, it's not like Bootskin is the shining star of reliability, as it BSODs in both VMWare (current version) and on my K6-2 (a while back, it's been a Linux router/BOINC machine for over a year now), and getting its custom progress bar aligned is a pain in the neck, so I'll look into finding/making a reasonably safe patching mechanism whenever I get around to being inspired to make a bootscreen.

I'll I would want for a boot screen is just the default Windows XP with the flag replaced by your amazing Tango-ized Windows flag. That's a good piece of art right there :p

Everything looks great! I just noticed even my systray icons are changed! No more funky looking shields! I can't wait for the logonui. I'll use the Windows 2000 logoff until it is done ;)

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