So I'm stealing away a couple of hours here and there on my second set of holidays to work on Wascana. One of the things I've done is created a logo. You can see it on the home page. It's pretty simple, an orange moon to represent a lunar eclipse, and a blue 'W' for Wascana. I made it using Paint.Net, a photo editor written in C# (for some reason...). But it was pretty handy since it supported layers and let me draw simple shapes like the circle and text.
The next phase of the exercise was to then use the logo to create images for the icons and bitmaps in Eclipse. I wasn't too happy with how Paint.Net scaled the images and I wanted more control over the properties of the circle and text. I tried a number of different programs, an old version of Paint Shop Pro (when it was still owned Jasc) and GIMP for Windows. Neither did what I wanted.
But that got me thinking. Why isn't there a plug-in for Eclipse which does this. I am making bitmaps for my .product file. Eclipse is for everything and nothing in particular, why not image editing? (And this plays into one of my dreams for Eclipse - and why not take to the next level and do 3D model editing too, both needed for game development - but I digress.) Does anyone know of any activity in that area?
Hi Doug, thanks for posting my thoughts :)
ReplyDeleteYou're so often in a situation where you at least want to watch which icon is behind foobar.gif. Image editor would be really cool ( see bug 85360) but I think as a first step a image viewer would fit many needs. Hasn't Wayne blogged about a simple image viewer plugin some monthes ago?
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ReplyDeleteI no not about an image plug-in but I myself sometimes dream about an integration simulation environment withing Eclipse with preprocessing (modeling), simulation which might involve grid features (there is a grid plugin for grids!) and postprocessing (viewing images)
ReplyDelete@benjamin: you must talking about this ?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-Image-Viewer/Image_viewer.html
I use Inkscape for all my images as it is free, cross platform and produces SVG files that in turn may produce excellent bitmap images in any format and any size.
Well, there is this kind of plugin inside of MyEclipse, but I guess it is one feature they have developed themselves
ReplyDeleteWhile I miss an image editor as well, I have found InkScape to be very handy. And very good for icons as well.
ReplyDeleteBenny, I'm guessing that you're referring to this?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.eclipse.org/evangelism/samples/imageviewer/
Inkscape is definitely the way to go Doug for icons. Maybe an Inkscape plugin for eclipse is in order.
ReplyDeleteIn comments to my blog post about the idea of using OSGi for a game engine, an ogre4j developer said they are doing an OGRE mesh viewer and other plug-ins for Eclipse.
ReplyDeletehttp://villane.blogspot.com/2006/10/idea-osgi-based-game-engine.html