balala wrote: ↑December 31st, 2018, 9:33 am
I think there is no need to use icons. raiguard, your Shape meter used into the Weather Meter skin of Modern Gadgets is much better then using a ready icon. I definitely prefer this approach, instead of some pngs.
I agree with you, in a way. I followed a little your talks on the matter, and that shape is definitely different and looks more slick (aka "modern", a la Windows 10 style). But then, of course, the implementation is a little more complex than just putting there some PNGs.
I've walked that road as well, with my first set of skins (not the skins I'm using now, though). I tried to illustrate
exactly how the sky, celestial bodies and weather would look like for any minute and second of the day, for every geographic coordinate. That included the (dynamic, changing every minute or so) brightness of the sky / light at whatever moment of the day (all types of twilight, transit, azimuths, etc.), the moon phases and its exact images (even moon's size as seen from Earth, if I remember correctly), plus the weather itself. I had 3 layers (the sky, celestial bodies and weather layers) that I used just like in Photoshop, one on the top of other, with transparency, color tint (to simulate the brightness/darkness), and so on...
I came to a point where I was very proud of how it looked (bar the weather layer, which I left for the end, it looked exactly like the sky at my location whenever I looked at it)... but had to halt the development when I found out that near the poles things were completely messed up. That wasn't exactly my fault, it was just how things are there (e.g. sun rising multiple times during the day, much longer periods of twilight, etc). I had lots of formulas to handle things and I wasn't in the mood to add the huge exceptions at higher latitudes, so it became an abandoned project (if, by any - very slim - chance, someone is interested, I can post the weather skin somewhere, for further development). For the next set of skins, I made things much simpler, and much more efficient in terms of resource usage - that's why I said that every option has its advantages and disadvantages, especially for a weather skin.