New Shape Type "Background Image" and other suggestions

[humdinger]

This is on vmware, hrev27404.

How about having a "Shape" of type background image, that won't be exported with the icon of course. You could load in any image to ease vectorizing a bitmap. Creating this background image Shape could add a Style with which you can control its alpha value or tint it by choosing another colour than white.

[Pete]

I second the above suggestion. With BeOS icons, I tended to do that quite often, and on a recent project, I had a photo I was working from, and it would have saved a lot of fiddling to have that as a background to work from directly.

I have some other thoughts and observations from my early experiences with the app, presented here for your consideration:

• Shapes should have checkboxes too. When I'm working with multiple layers in a paint program, I like to be able to hide them individually, to get a more exact idea of what each is contributing. I found I wanted to do the same with shapes in Icon-O-Matic. This is possible by unchecking the associated paths, but that's rather less convenient than a simple checkbox on the shape.

• A shape's rotation point should remain where placed, and not return to the 'centroid' when you leave the shape and return to it. (A 're-centre' menu option would then also be helpful.)

• I was using a Wacom tablet to do the drawing, which turned out to have some disadvantages... Unlike a mouse, it is almost impossible to do a simple click (because the pen-tip always moves when you press it), so any point inserted in a path always ended up as a Bezier one -- whether I wanted that or not! Also the pen doesn't have a mouse-wheel (nor does the ThinkPad itself) so I found no way to zoom the image.

• One other facility I thought would be useful is some way of placing (foreground) 'Reference marks'. I wanted to rotate several shapes about a common centre, and it was very hard to move the rotation point to the same pixel for each. Being able to place a fixed reference -- in this case the actual centre of the image -- would have made things much easier. (I ended up creating a dummy 'centre-point' shape, that I suppressed when I was done with it.)

• Alt-A 'Select All' doesn't work on my ThinkPad (key assignment problem?) Have to drag-select.