01.21.07
Pretty Pictures Redux
(Astute readers will notice there is no “Pretty Pictures” entry. Well, there is, but it’s sitting among the drafts that ran too long and lost focus. Maybe it will appear in the future, but this entry can stand alone without it.)
Dan Bennett’s NeoOffice application icon was recently named “one of the Best Mac Icons ever” (I’m paraphrasing from a post about this; I don’t have the issue myself) by Mac|Life (née MacAddict) magazine. That announcement made all the more timely this subject (one I had been planning on writing about for some time).
While open source developers often get little recognition for all of their hard work, many times the people who spend just as much time getting the images and appearance of an application just right get even less attention. This entry is all about changing that, at least when it comes to the people who have given NeoOffice nothing short of a complete visual makeover.
Dan’s icon (and new splash screen and about box image for NeoOffice/J 1.1) were the first steps in making the imagery in NeoOffice more palatable for users.
The icon went from this:
To this:
Even at the 16×16 size, recognizability remains
The next big step in the NeoOffice “makeover” was the Aqua widget work begun in late 2005 and debuting in spring 2006, when Ed banished all of the ugly Windows-like buttons, checkboxes, and so forth and replaced them with the beautiful blue buttons Mac users have come to expect (compare this with this), and Patrick similarly banished the wretched OpenOffice.org Open & Save dialogues and replaced them with the normal Mac ones.
Along with that work came new document icons (and splash screen and about box image) from Daniel Pimley, which improved tremendously upon the document icons that I had created (which had been in use since NeoOffice/J 0.8). “Tremendously” really doesn’t go far enough, as the only thing my icons had going for them was that they were largely created in NeoOffice/J itself 
NeoOffice/J 0.8 icons in the top row, NeoOffice/J 1.1 icons in the middle row, and NeoOffice 2.0 icons in the bottom row
All of this beautification left one area remaining (besides the grey color and general poor UI choices of the OpenOffice.org developers) as a sore thumb: the icons on the toolbars and throughout the application. NeoOffice 2.1 will address that, at long last. For the past year or so, Armando Nava (better known in NeoOffice circles as “Punto Mac”) has been slaving over hundreds of millions of pixels, working on creating more Mac-like replacements for the several thousand icons used inside the application (there are 7,225 icons are in the .zip file used by the program). Although NeoOffice 2.1 won’t have all seven thousand icons replaced, a great many of them have been redone in the Akua style, thanks to the hard work of Armando (with help from Daniel Pimley and Oscar Van Vliet), but most of the main toolbar icons in each of the NeoOffice components will be the Akua icons.
NeoOffice 1.2 (Writer) toolbar icons in the top row, NeoOffice 2.0 with stock OpenOffice.org toolbar icons in the middle row, and NeoOffice 2.0 with Akua toolbar icons in the bottom row—although, truly, like all Mac icons, the Akua icons look best at a slightly larger size, so set your toolbars to large when NeoOffice 2.1 comes out 
So let this be a small shout of appreciation for the hard work of our graphic artists, toiling night after night among the pixels to make our open source applications look a bit more at home on our Mac desktops and in our Docks 