Re: ICNS as default format

[Eric Wasylishen]

Hi Gregory,

> The proposed benefit is the same benefit that Mac OS X sees from using
> the ICNS format.   Icons and other graphics will look better at larger
> sizes because the optimal version of the icon should be chosen by
> GNUstep for display instead of zooming the image.   TIFF is also an
> acceptable solution since it can handle multiple versions in one file,
> I'm not sure if our code currently supports pulling out different
> representations from TIFF files.

It supports that - in fact, you can see it in action if you try setting
the GSScaleFactor default to 2 - various interface images (menu arrows, 
dimples, 
scroller arrows) will switch to using a higher-resolution representation from 
the TIFF. I guess I need to promote this more ;-)

So, I don't think there is any technical reason to switch to ICNS over TIFF
because once the representations are loaded by NSImage, it should make no
difference which format they came from.

I agree we want to support choosing optimal icon sizes based on the size
they are to be displayed in, like you get when displaying an ICNS in
an NSImageView on Cocoa - but implementing this should be orthogonal
to the details of whether the image is TIFF or ICNS. I wrote some more on this
topic in the "NSImage and ICNS" thread.

Cheers,
Eric