You know a concept has merit when it's picked up by Google. Google have adopted the Open Share Icon (OSI), the product of a creative partnership that I'm proud to have played a part in. This is something to celebrate: you don't need highly paid professionals or deep pockets to pull off a good idea: you just need plain-old enthusiasm and an unmet need. Here is the story of how the Open Share Icon (OSI) came to be.
Continue reading 'Open Share Icon from idea to Google'
Tag archive for 'icons'
Thorsten Lemke's GraphicConverter is the Swiss Army Knife of image editors, and starting with v6.2 uses the Geotag Icon to clearly highlight geotag-related menu options for showing/ setting positions via Google Earth, editing GPS coordinate values, and geotagging photos via GPX files. iTrail, a track logging app for iPhone, now sports new tab bar and padlock icons I contributed to developer Justin Davis (preview). I was impressed by the extent to which the iPhone SDK manipulates white outline shapes with transparency that result in the inactive grey/ active blue icon states that you see.
Geo Mashup by Dylan Kuhn uses the Google Maps API to search for locations and geocode WordPress posts for plotting on a customized map. Features include display by category, inclusion of post excerpts in pop-up info windows, automatic generation of GeoRSS feeds (example), importation of KML files, and flexible template tag options (e.g. you can write code to create waypoints in RouteBuddy). The Geotag Icon was added to v1.1b3 and illustrates "Show on map" links.
Andreas Schneider's open-source Geotag application supports automatic (via GPX import) and manual geotagging (via Google Maps/ Google Earth), and is compatible with most raw image formats. This cross-platform tool requires Java SE 6 runtime—sadly available for 64-bit Intel Macs running Leopard only. The latest release showcases a new icon (preview)—the third David, icerabbit and I (with others) have jointly worked on (the other two being the Geotag Icon and the Open Share Icon).
WordPress 2.5 lets you search across pages (non-blog entries) as well as posts. This is undoubtedly a good thing, but if your pages are liable to turn up in site searches you might want to make a couple of changes to stop page content from swamping your results screen and improve appearances if you use category icons.
Continue reading 'Pages and searching in WordPress 2.5'
A backlash in the face of threats from ShareThis.com/ Nextumi Inc., owners of the trademarked Share Icon originally promoted as "generic", has prompted creation of the Open Share Icon Project—a free, open, community-driven alternative. The Share Icon has become synonymous with the commercial ShareThis brand & widget (registration terms) & even the "Classic" plugin requires publishers to actively opt-out of "sharing" their data to the ShareThis service. The working design of the new open icon features cupped hands passing/ receiving an item ("pass it on") as well as an eye reference ("look at this").








