Creating Icons and the Icon Library

You create icons for Icon Text Buttons, for Procedure Icon Buttons, or for Icon Objects themselves. The following text assumes you are creating an icon for a button, but the description is exactly the same if it were for an Icon Object instead. (The Icon Object is one of the choices from the tool palette.)
Just substitute the words "icon object" for "button" below.

The starting point is that you have dropped an icon button (or an icon object) in a Menu, Dialog, or Screen definition and you now wish to draw the icon.

Observe that when the cursor is inside the button it becomes a pencil tool. You
can start to draw your icon using this pencil tool on the button that you see. But you would soon tire of that, the problem is that you can't see what you are doing well enough to be effective. Instead, go to the edge of the button, get the "object select" cursor, and right-click to get the properties. Press the "Edit Icon" button that you find in the properties box. You will see two new things show up to assist you in developing an icon:

The first is an 800% blowup of the button, complete with a set of tools you will need to create the icon. The second is a color palette.

If possible, position the blowup on your screen so that you can still see the original button. As you draw the icon in the blowup, you will see what it looks like on the original button as they track each other. To reposition the blowup, or for that matter, to reposition the properties box or the palette, drag them by their title bar.

The default tool is the pencil tool, it is the second from the left and it should show up in blue indicating that it is the currently selected tool.

As you click in the blowup with the pencil you see the icon start to develop. The pencil is a toggle, with each click a pixel is lit up with whatever current color is selected in the color palette. Click again on that same pixel and it reverts back.

To get a richer set of colors to work with, click on the line that says "Color/Pattern" in the color palette. You get a pulldown menu, from which select "Add new color." Then you seethe color selector shown below. Select a color and click OK. You are then asked to name the color (as show to the right).

Give the color a name (in the example we had already named it "red" before we took the screen shot), click OK, and that color is added to the palette.

To use a color in your drawing, select it in the palette by clicking on it. Once selected, the drawing tool you use will employ that color.

The drawing tools are self-explanatory, play with them in order to get familiar.

One tool, the "pour" tool can use some extra explanation, so here it is: Use the pencil and make a square in the center of your practice icon. Make sure that the square completely encloses the pixels inside it so that they are separated from the pixels outside. Now suppose you want to color the inside pixels red. One way to do it is to select red on the palette and start clicking on the inside pixels with the pencil. But the fast way to do it is to use the "pour" tool (it is supposed to look like a paint can with paint pouring out of it), and click once inside the square. They all turn red.

Now use the pour tool to turn the inside pixels back to gray. Now use the pencil and toggle just one pixel on the edge of the square so that it too, is back to gray. So now the square does not completely separate the inside pixels from the outside pixels. Try to pour red inside the imperfect square and observe what happens. If you give the pour tool an escape hatch, it takes it and turns all the pixels, both inside and outside.

Using the Icon Library

Once you have created an icon it can be saved so that the next time you need it you won't have to create it again. When you want to save an icon, click the "Save Icon" button in the properties box. You see somethinglike this:

There is s scrolling list of previously saved icons, and you wish to add this one to that list. Type in a name for your new icon and click the Save button. Your icon is added to the list.

Whatever you named the icon is the name you will use (in quotes) in procedures that dynamically move icons into buttons. To see an example of this in the Example Data Base, try Processes/DataEntry/Customers and view the customers using the "Fixed Screen." Observe the traffic light that changes as you go from customer to customer.

The Icon Library is in the file "ddlicon.lib" that is found in the same directory as Thunderbolt. Since Thunderbolt is installed in each machine that uses it, each machine will have its own Icon Library, and over time they will diverge.

So how do you get an icon from one library to the next? Paste the icon (see below) into a button in a scratch definition. Now copy that definition from the Catalog to a file (Form2 of the COPY DEFTYPE ). Transfer the file to the other machine. Copy the file into the other Catalog (Form3 of COPY DEFTYPE ). Pull up that definition and save the icon into the icon library as described above.

Recall and Paste a Saved Icon

Later, when you have some new button or icon object in a definition and you wish to recall a previously saved icon so that you can paste it into the new object, here is how: Get the properties for the new icon object and click on "RecallIcon." Here is what you will see:

Scroll through the list until you find what you want, select it (click on it) and click on the "Paste" button. Try pasting both scaled and unscaled and observe the difference between the two. Sometimes when you scale an icon it gets distorted, other times not. If it distorts, try changing the size of the receiving object and paste it again.