Move to Syncthing's icons for the tray icon

[dragons4life]

On windows 10

Not really a huge bug or problem, but in case you want to fix it.

[canton7]

Yeah, that's the result of scaling a large icon down to a small size. Ideally small icons need to be designed to be small, rather than taking an icon which was designed to be large and then scaling it down.

Unfortunately I don't have the skills to do this. If you or any graphic designers you know would be willing to touch it up I'd be hugely grateful!

[dragons4life]

Can you give me the Icon and size you need?

[canton7]

Everything's in the repository, here: https://github.com/canton7/SyncTrayzor/tree/master/src/SyncTrayzor/Icons

[canton7]

The tray icons are 16x16

[gerbilOFdoom]

How's this?

[canton7]

It's nice and clear, thanks! My worry is that it departs too far from Syncthing's logo: the circle being turned into a square, etc. It's not immediately recognisable as the Syncthing logo, or at least it wasn't to me.

[canton7]

Might be worth looking at what the other Gui apps have done in terms of 16x16 icons and asking nicely if they mind us stealing one, heh

[AudriusButkevicius]

It looks like the letter DD, and definately has less pixels than the icons in the original screenshot. Are you sure its 16x16?

[canton7]

I've little doubt that it's possible to have a 16x16 image which accurately depicts the syncthing logo: the main thing that needs to happen is widening of the white lines, and some tweaking of the anti-aliassing around the edge of the blue circle (although I'm no graphic designer) .

[gerbilOFdoom]

Some of my googling revealed that, depending on your build process, the ico file may not be linked correctly.

[canton7]

Not sure what you mean by that. The ico file was generated using the gimp, and is not part of the build process.

[gerbilOFdoom]

How is the ico file linked to the executable?

[canton7]

It's either kept as a separate file, or is an embedded resource, I can't remember. I'm still not sure what your point is though: the icon looks as it should: the image from which the ico is generated looks exactly like the icon in the taskbar. It's just that the starting image didn't look great...

[gerbilOFdoom]

The starting image is actually rather clear - what might be happening is that the wrong layer of the ico file is being used

[canton7]

I've looked at this previously (there's an old issue on this) and the correct ico resolution is being used. The issue is that the 16x16 export of the syncthing logo svg, without further tweaking, does not look optimal.

On 17 September 2015 22:13:44 CEST, Bryson Zimmerman notifications@github.com wrote:

The starting image is actually rather clear - what might be happening is that the wrong layer of the ico file is being used

---

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/canton7/SyncTrayzor/issues/140#issuecomment-141213578

[canton7]

Either way, the icon resolution to use is chosen at runtime, not build-time, and had nothing to do with the build process.

[fredericseiler]

Best results with the Lanczos algorithm.

• 512x512
• 256x256
• 128x128 :
• 96x96 :
• 64x64 :
• 32x32 :
• 24x24 :
• 16x16 :
• Icon file (remove the .txt on saving) : syncthing.ico.txt

You also can grab the clean favicon.png from a Syncthing instance (with a bonus vector logo : /assets/img/safari-pinned-tab.svg).

[canton7]

Amazing, thankyou! :smile:

I don't suppose you could generate a 24x24, or tell me which tool you used to generate them?

[canton7]

Actually, I'll need to generate a load of others - warning triangle, paused icon, etc.

[fredericseiler]

Added some more.

I just used the RealFaviconGenerator API to compare compressions and render the .ico.

For the pngs, I grabbed the original 512x512 transparent .png from Wikipedia and resized it using Paint.NET.

Edit : RealFaviconGenerator renders only 16x16, 32x32 and 48x48 in the .ico, because it's optimized for favicons (obviously...). If you want an .ico with 24x24 in it, you'll have to merge manually.

[fredericseiler]

There's also a bunch of free online services to generate .ico files :

• ConvertICO (syncthing-convertico.ico.txt - 361KB)
• ICO Convert (syncthing-icoconvert.ico.txt - 41.8KB)

[canton7]

Aha, didn't realise that Paint.NET supported Lanczos, thanks. Looking further, it seems Gimp does too (just not Inkscape, which is what I use to edit the svgs).

I generate the icos with Gimp, so that's fine.

[fredericseiler]

The resampling algorithm used by Paint.NET for "Best Quality" preset on resizing is Fant (and it's not so bad).

Anyway, thanks for this really useful app.

[canton7]

I guess anything's better than Inkscape's algorithm... I'll get some better icos together using Lanczos. Thanks!

[canton7]

Righty, I re-created all of the icons using lanczos, available here: https://ci.appveyor.com/project/canton7/synctrayzor/build/1.1.7.315/artifacts

To be honest it's not much better...

[fredericseiler]

Haven't you forgotten to update default_tray.ico in d8ed49a ?

[canton7]

Oops! Fixed. Thanks.

[fredericseiler]

So you have to choose between blurry and/or pixelated.

Like you originally said, it's more a "scale down" issue than a technical/algorithm one. I'll tweak the white ring/paths width to test, because it's fun and I got nothing to do for the next hour.

[fredericseiler]

Ok, first attempt :

[canton7]

I'm wary of straying too far from the Syncthing logo (as in, anything that looks visually different to the Syncthing logo): https://forum.syncthing.net/t/syncthing-gtk-icon/6705/4

[fredericseiler]

Well, let's hope Syncthing will adopt a simpler logo one day :)

[scienmind]

I was wondering about the blurriness on Win10 as well. I thought it had something to do with HiDPI scaling. It may be unrelated. But if you are doing something there, it worth taking it into account.

[canton7]

Nope, not doing anything there.

[norgeous]

Will you be supporting / switching to the new icon set?

[canton7]

Maybe. I was going to let it stew in Syncthing for a few weeks, see if anything gets tweaked (since creating all the icos I need in all the resolutions I need from the SVGs is a PITA, and I only want to do it once).

[canton7]

I'll probably need to add a few more on top of Syncthing's standard set, but that should be fine.

[canton7]

There are a few other issues around changing the icons as well (but to different things). Any attempt should also consider those