I would note that it’s only the app icons that look like this. Big Sur’s icons for technologies (e.g. the PrefPane icons representing system components) are weirder-shaped than ever.
Thus, I feel like this change actually helps to differentiate the two. Sort of like how capital letters help differentiate proper nouns in English. You can tell when an app is “mentioning” another app visually (as in a plugin, or an “Open In” action) — without even knowing what the other app is — just because it has “app shape.”
I would also point out that this was already something useful in iOS; in the App Store, you can visually differentiate regular apps from iMessage app-plugins by their icon shape. Those iMessage app-plugins are then always “mentioned” in iMessage itself using that same shape.
That's because it's calculating it on the fly for every request; it's not caching it apparently. I don't understand why something like this wouldn't be server-rendered and cached.
Because when I first built it, it was only a site I botched together really quickly for a handful of icons I made. And I haven't had the time to re-make it, which is what I'm doing right now.
Ideally, yes. But alas, many parts of the web do not run well on all hardware. There is an extremely wide range of devices in use on the internet, and western developers are often in the 1%.
Interesting project. I'm curious about his mention of server costs in the sponsor request - it looks like he's serving downloads of the icon pack from github, so that shouldn't be a big bandwidth cost. It appears that he's using vercel serverless; the free tier appears quite generous, and the $20 paid tier should be affordable. I understand asking for donations, more just curious why it is expensive to run this.
Edit: never mind; seems he's using firebase storage, which could get pricey. Maybe it would make sense to serve over github pages or similar to keep costs down. Or even an el cheapo VPS, which should have more than enough space to store the images and plenty of bandwidth to serve them. Cache the number of icons and run a cronjob every ten minutes that scans the directory and updates the number.
It uses Firebase.
It really looks very expensive for the functionality and 1.5K monthly visits.. But the developer seems to be fully transparent about costs.
Based on information from the developer's website, it looks like they're still a university student, so probably using what is a cool and easy approach; they probably haven't learned a lot about load and scale. That Firebase bill could probably be written off as tuition :-)
Most probably you're right, it's sad, costs could probably be a lot smaller and contributions could be a small but sweet and deserved compensation for coffee/beer :-)
I only used Firebase because when I built the site it was only a small scale solution, but now that is has blown I'm looking at alternatives because this is just a waste of everyone's money. And by the way, I only graduated from my master's last month, and I'm not even a computer scientist, I went to design school and have a degree in industrial design, hence my messy code practices. I'm working on them though, so if anyone is willing to give me a hand or some guidance, feel free to do so.
When I built this site I really didn't think much of it and used Firebase just because it was really quick to build and I was getting only a few hundred visits a day. But since last Friday it has received over 35K visits hence the really expensive bill, which by the way is not so much for the storage, but for reading the Firestore database. I simply haven't had the time to re-build the site in a more efficient way it since then, hopefully tomorrow I'll get working on it and find a better alternative solution.
I'm not sure if I'm reading this project correctly but aren't all of the icons already hosted on github for free? This whole website can be hosted for free on github pages with one javascript script for search, right?
No, he's pulling the individual ones from firebase storage. That's also why the webpage displays "0 icons" for a second after it loads; it has to go fetch the icon total from firebase.
The issue is not actually hosting, all the icons are lazy loaded. I'm pulling the data about the icons from Firestore which include a URL for the png and the .icns file. Right now I'm looking at alternatives, I'm aware this is not the most efficient thing, but I just haven't had time to change it since it blew up last Friday. For reference, last week we had a little less than 1000 icons, and today there's almost 2000.
yeah but the icons are already on github aren't they? Why are they on reduntly hosted on firebase? This whole website can be free on github pages - very confusing.
Because I stopped using GitHub to submit icons to let non techies submit them, GitHub is all good for static sites but I needed something that would let uses submit icons directly from the website without needing to know how to use GitHub, here is a thread I created that explains it all better: https://twitter.com/elrumo/status/1328860367850758146?s=21
I’ll be moving away from Firebase into something that more sense soon anyway, it was just an oversight from me as I not expected it to to get to 40k visits in just a few days, I was only expecting a few hundred a day.
You can actually if you have a version of the app before it was updated with the new icon. If you right click and show package contents, then copy out the .icns app icon file.
Happy to say I contributed an icon for IDLE, the preinstalled Python editor I can't help but use when toying about with projects and research. It was a fairly easy venture, even though I’ve never touched icon development before.
The icons for Ableton Live stand out as totally against the UI style of the app itself. I'd rather the icon reflected (ahem) the app, rather than misplaced interpretations of the OS' design choices.
I went through a period of customizing my app icons as part of an overall desktop customization phase. It got exhausting. Much of the time when an app updated itself it would happily overwrite the custom icon with its own, meaning I had to run the equivalent of a cron script to open the custom-icon-installer-app periodically to put things back the way I liked them. Not sure if it's still the case, but at some point several years ago I threw in the towel and let the dock be whatever it was going to be, based on the apps I use.
Those who are busy putting these in, has it gotten any better or is it still a constant game of whack-a-mole to keep your customizations?
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 26.2 ms ] threadThus, I feel like this change actually helps to differentiate the two. Sort of like how capital letters help differentiate proper nouns in English. You can tell when an app is “mentioning” another app visually (as in a plugin, or an “Open In” action) — without even knowing what the other app is — just because it has “app shape.”
I would also point out that this was already something useful in iOS; in the App Store, you can visually differentiate regular apps from iMessage app-plugins by their icon shape. Those iMessage app-plugins are then always “mentioned” in iMessage itself using that same shape.
Edit: never mind; seems he's using firebase storage, which could get pricey. Maybe it would make sense to serve over github pages or similar to keep costs down. Or even an el cheapo VPS, which should have more than enough space to store the images and plenty of bandwidth to serve them. Cache the number of icons and run a cronjob every ten minutes that scans the directory and updates the number.
It uses Firebase. It really looks very expensive for the functionality and 1.5K monthly visits.. But the developer seems to be fully transparent about costs.
This could literally just be a single PHP files hosted for $1 a month unlimited bandwidth shared host or even free tiers that are available.
So it does seem a bit weird to ask for a sponsor for hosting costs while also using one of the most expensive options.
I’ll be moving away from Firebase into something that more sense soon anyway, it was just an oversight from me as I not expected it to to get to 40k visits in just a few days, I was only expecting a few hundred a day.
Then on the new version of the app, replace the icon as described here: https://www.howtogeek.com/677739/how-to-change-app-file-and-...
There is big issue with similarity of apps icons/logos which are based on "Q" lettering.
[0] https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Promotion/issues/14
Those who are busy putting these in, has it gotten any better or is it still a constant game of whack-a-mole to keep your customizations?