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Iconography of the PuTTY tools

chiark.greenend.org.uk

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Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools

#101

Post by gerdesj »

JadeNB wrote: post #40
gerdesj wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"while being so absurdly well-organized." I note a z in organized ... I do get where you are coming from: My mum used to joke about a fictional sign that said "Please do not throw stones at this sign". Some of our signage is absolutely laughable. We do have road signs that proclaim: "New signage" or "New road system" etc. The locals know what has changed already and non locals are encountering it for the first time a…

> We do have road signs that proclaim: "New signage" or "New road system" etc. The locals know what has changed already and non locals are encountering it for the first time anyway, so why bother. I'm not sure it's as absurd as it sounds. Do you look at the signage you pass every day? I suspect I don't. When they put in a new stop sign near where I live (in the US), things were less safe for a long time because peopl…

Fair point.

"Do you look at the signage you pass every day?" - I do and so does my sodding car and it still annoys me when it gets the speed limits wrong!

I accept I'm not everyone and noting and warning about change is a good idea. We do have a lot of signs and I'm pretty sure I've seen signs warning about upcoming signage (not really 8)

I'm happy to report that I've driven in several US states (mostly FL, including around and in Miami and Orlando) and found it pretty straight forward. "Right on red" is pure genius and "four way pass in turn" is not, especially when multiple lanes are involved!

Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools

#102

Post by ziml77 »

kccqzy wrote: post #87

> Windows was defaulting to displaying 48 × 48 icons instead of 32 × 32 […] I found that MacOS wanted a 128 × 128 icon to use in the dock This was one of the most superficial and yet most visceral reason I switched from Windows to Mac OS X at that time. With 128 × 128 icons, the entry point to apps—their icon in Finder or the Dock—simply looked more appealing and viscerally more beautiful. Especially that Windows app…

I don't know about how it was on OS X at the time, but one of the things that really annoyed me with Windows applications was how crappy most of their icons looked. Hardly anyone seemed to care about making proper icons. Some didn't update their icons when the default size changed to 48x48, leading to them looking blurry due to the scaling up. Others included all the icon sizes but they were all just scaled down from some image that only looked good at a large size. All of the detail became muddied together in a mess of an icon at the typical icon sizes.

I would often make custom icons for applications and then use a resource editor to change them within the executable, just so I didn't have to see the ugly icons on my desktop or in my taskbar.

Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools

#103

Post by efilife »

ghxst wrote: post #20
rzzzt wrote: post #9

This sentence resonates with me: "After a few failed attempts, I realised that Pageant would never get released at all if I waited until I’d drawn the icon I wanted". Many of the projects I'd like to tinker with stop at such self-inflicted roadblocks. My favorite is getting stuck at naming the repository/top-level folder.

One of the areas LLMs has been most helpful to me personally has to be getting over naming choices lol, whether it's repos, variables or structs for some reason I tend to have a hard time coming up with names :').

What LLM do you use to help you come up with names? ChatGPT sucks at it

Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools

#104

Post by asyx »

rzzzt wrote: post #21
metalliqaz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AKA "bike-shedding"

I don't expect fully fledged brand names to pop out of my brain and don't workshop it endlessly, but I can't call all of them "New folder" either.

I just call them what they are or do. If I ever release anything to the public I can still think of a name that makes sense.

Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools

#105

Post by arantius »

Lammy wrote: post #8

I wonder if the “Agent” hat iconography was inspired by Forté Agent, the most (IMHO) popular Usenet software for Windows, which used a very similar motif: https://archive.org/details/forte-agent-1.6 Love reading this kind of history straight from the creator :)

Sibling already mentions this, but the wording of the article almost directly but not quite says it's "Spy vs. Spy" based. I'm not aware of an official link to document this but

https://www.google.com/search?q=spy+vs+spy&udm=2

An image search will show you plenty copies of the inspiration for this hat.

Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools

#106

Post by petesergeant »

cookie_monsta wrote: post #98
robinhouston wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not my experience of Australians at all! The Australians I’ve met (through working for an Australian company) all seem to love their nanny state, and genuinely don’t understand how anyone could see anything undesirable in it.

It might be useful here to give a current example or two of Aussie nanny statism, just for context

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-30/malcolm-turnbull-fine...

Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools

#107

Post by namaria »

somat wrote: post #41
metalliqaz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AKA "bike-shedding"

Isn't bike-shedding when other people block you with low-effort critisism. """ Parkinson shows how you can go in to the board of directors and get approval for building a multi-million or even billion dollar atomic power plant, but if you want to build a bike shed you will be tangled up in endless discussions. Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast, so expensive and so complicated that peo…

Bike shedding in Parkinson's description is paradoxically putting more thought on things that are easy to comprehend than things that are hard to grasp.

Yak shaving is having to do something seemingly unrelated to your project before you can make progress on more evidently related issues.

Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools

#108

Post by opello »

munificent wrote: post #43
Sharlin wrote: post #11

> I can’t remember why the lightning bolt was yellow. With hindsight that seems the strangest thing about it; cyan would have been a more obvious choice for electricity. Possibly it was just to contrast more with the blue screens of the computers. I had to stop and consider this, because it seemed to me that yellow was "obviously" the correct color. And indeed a few image searches confirmed this: a yellow lightning b…

In particular, WinAmp at the time used a yellow lightning bolt in its icon, which was on damn near every Windows machine in the 90s.

Also vintage of the era is ZOC[1] which was a dialer and terminal emulator whose "O" used a yellow lightning bolt.

[1] https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/ZOC

(The Wikipedia page for the application does not have the same splash screen that the above link does and the above is certainly the version I remember.)

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