Cliff Claven here with useless fact #27: The understood language of business is English. (Not necessarily any particular dialect... pick your armour or your colors.) Most companies speak English when conducting business.

To be honest, I prefer Ye Olde English spellings. They just have that class to them. Maybe it was all those hours spent playing Ultima and Dungeons & Dragons? I never was one to go along with the masses, though...


George

and... yes, the topic police have returned!


George

> > mostly the idea that it's the worlds most populate language.

> I always thought that the largest percentage of people on this planet spoke
> some dialect of Chinese. Did I miss a memo?

Well, AFAIK, english is taught at chinese schools.
Some other poster said something about italians not speaking english. However, most young italians learnt english at school, though in some areas (in the north), the first foreign language taught is german.
French people are a whole different story though. They tend to deny their knowledge of any foreign language, at least as long as you meet them in France.

cu,
sven

PS: Do we get a little off topic?

cu,
sven

This thread went off-topic, so maybe I skimmed too quickly to see if someone else had already suggested this, but:

Changing the icons in emplode [is/should-be] quite easy.

Microangelo Librarian (part of the sharware Microangelo icon-editing suite [sic]) allows you to extract as well as REPLACE icons embedded in .DLL, .EXE, etc. files without corrupting the rest of the file.

I successfully changed the Windows flag on the Start button to a classic yellow smiley and put it up as shareware about four years ago (and am still getting e-mail to this day, asking how I did it) doing this. It seems you can steal as well as replace any icon in any filetype.

Enjoy.



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Reg #57xx, Ser #080000141, Rec'd Aug.11/00

It's even easier for me . I've got the original toolbar icon open in front of me right now. The only things holding me back are:

a) It's not on the TODO list for the next release. Why? See (b), below.
b) We'd have to change the animation on the player to match. This is more complicated.


Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

We'd have to change the animation on the player to match

Depends on how much you want to change.

The circular thing in emplode causes the confusion; not the animation on the player.
I'd be quite happy when you keep the player graphics as it they are (they don't confuse anyone, I think), and only remove the circle from the sync icon in emplode. Any icon with just arrows will solve it.

I *could* go into the next release then . . .
(though it's highly unlikely I'll ever confuse the 'sync' button with an 'undo' again )

Henno
mk2 6 nr 6

So what's wrong with making the emplode icon the same as the Synch animation on the empeg? (Not animated of course). This would get my vote, as you at least get the visual coordination of images for the user (known as "User Affordance" in usability jargon )

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015

So what's wrong with making the emplode icon the same as the Synch animation on the empeg?

Currently, it is the same as the synch animation on the empeg (well, one arrow instead of two- possibly becauuse of a limitation in the number of available pixels).

The root of the original complaint is that any curved arrow icon (regardless of the number of arrows IMO) could be misinterpreted as an Undo icon, since that's what Microsoft uses for their Undo buttons.

Funny thing is, it's just a convention, and has nothing to do with reality. For instance, one of my suggestions for the synch icon was an exclamation mark. If you think about it, an exclamation mark would be a logical icon for an undo button as well.

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Tony Fabris

Microangelo Librarian (part of the sharware Microangelo icon-editing suite [sic]) allows you to extract as well as REPLACE icons embedded in .DLL, .EXE, etc. files without corrupting the rest of the file.

My version of Microangelo Librarian is only allowing me to edit the explorer icons in Emplode, not its toolbar buttons. I may have an older version of it. Does your version allow you to edit the toolbar buttons?

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Tony Fabris

The toolbar buttons aren't icons. They're bitmaps. More precisely, the entire toolbar is a single bitmap, with the button images aligned on a 16x16 (or was it x15) grid. Therefore, an icon editor won't generally help you.

We're considering using one of Tony's funky new icons in emplode. Personally, I'd quite like one with two arrows, kinda like Outlook Express' Send/Receieve button. Tony?



Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

The toolbar buttons aren't icons. They're bitmaps. More precisely, the entire toolbar is a single bitmap, with the button images aligned on a 16x16 (or was it x15) grid. Therefore, an icon editor won't generally help you.

Of course. I've built these kinds of resources myself before, so I knew this. The only reason I asked about Microangelo is that I thought a new version of the program might have been able to detect these things and binary-edit them within an .EXE file. The version I've got, as you said, is just an icon editor, but I was hoping a newer version had gotten crafty. Not as a solution to the Emplode complaint, but just for my own fun with other .EXE files.

We're considering using one of Tony's funky new icons in emplode. Personally, I'd quite like one with two arrows, kinda like Outlook Express' Send/Receieve button. Tony?

I thought I did post one with two straight arrows. Perhaps not in the first post, but in my follow-up later. Here is the file again:



I'm not familiar with Outlook (I don't use it and have removed its files from my hard drive), but I'd be happy to draw whatever you wanted.

You're welcome to use any of the icons I drew. I posted them for that purpose. My only concern is that I guessed at the X/Y dimension limitations, and I'm not certain if the ones I drew were too big or not.

Oh, and the horizontal lighning bolt was ripped off from Lotus Notes, so if you decided you liked that one, we should re-draw it from scratch so that it's more different.

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Tony Fabris

Ack, my bad. Microangelo probably can't touch those bitmaps. I didn't fire up my copy with any emplode files to see what I could see.

There's got to be some other tool that hacks embedded bitmaps...

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Reg #57xx, Ser #080000141, Rec'd Aug.11/00

There's got to be some other tool that hacks embedded bitmaps...

I always enjoyed using Borland's Resource Workshop for this. Although its primary purpose was to edit the source code resources for your own programs, it also let you directly edit .EXE files if you wanted. Very slick. You could go in and edit menus, or fields in dialog boxes if you wanted. And yes, bitmaps as well. I've edited the card backs in video poker programs with it, for example.

Sometimes you could even perform genuine hacks with it. For example, if a shareware version of a program put up a custom dialog box as its pester screen, simply deleting or renaming that resource made the box go away. If a program's "save" function was disabled in the shareware release, sometimes a simple menu edit took care of it. Most software is much smarter than this. But there were a few that could be tricked in this fashion.

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Tony Fabris

(Again, here I am bringing up old threads, this should be the last one though)

We're considering using one of Tony's funky new icons in emplode.

I still like the normal icons. Anything else would seem out of place with my system having this icon all over the place. Installing ActiveSync for my iPaq just shows even more use of the two arrows forming a circle to represent a sync. I have attached a picture with the normal look of undo, and the sync icons ActiveSync uses. Look for my last post in this thread for the Palm sync icon.