[admin (no pm's please)]

We are going to need a bucket of 24x24 icons to do the social networking bit.

All the icons for the status or people and their relationships

think words likeL

approved
not approved
online
offline
vacation
banned
gagged/ignore
best friend/love/thumbs up/thumbsdown/

probably we can raid a lot of these from the smilies. e.g. people will be able to assign a smilie to the friend which will be a non-functional thing.

But the rest of it that reflects how two people interact should probably be more consistently themed.

[Bravo]

Do these already have a border?

Purple colour scheme?

[admin (no pm's please)]

These will be borderless, and I guess purple is the "in" colour.

I have no idea how possible it would be, but I guess ideally what we would want for the core icons is something in perhaps 4 shades of purple, so with a wave of a wand at some point we could rework to another colour scheme.

This idea might be a non starter, as some icons like banned/approved lend themselves far more naturally to reds/greens etc.

[Danny M]

This any good, and not sure how well you can read the text and i just seen, that you might be wanting it on the purple colours again

So if yes, i will change

[Danny M]

[admin (no pm's please)]

I think we won't be wanting text on most icons, and that was not very readable anyway. All the icons will have "alt" text so people will see what they mean.

As already said, color themed would be nice but probably unworkable.

[Danny M]

Are you happy with the MSN online icon for the online image and the MSN offline icon for the offline image

Or is that not what you were looking for

[admin (no pm's please)]

erm are you saying you have entered someone elses image that is probably copyrighted?

[Bravo]

One colour with a set overlay, which can be changed to any colour at all. On transparent background to accomodate further colour changes:

Aproved:

[admin (no pm's please)]

Looking good, how about a banned icon? I fancy that if banned can look good in purple then anything can be done

[Bravo]

Oh I did not approved, will have a crack at banned next...

Not approved:

[Bravo]

Banned:



Might be a little simple, but given the remit of being colour interchangeable it may be as far as we can go.

[Bravo]

Few more, hopefully they don't need an explanation as to what symbolises what:

[Bravo]

Few bonus ones you might find useful:

[admin (no pm's please)]

Looking very good.

I think the bulbs need a fix, I am not sure which is on and which is off, guess the on one needs a few frizzy lines.

[admin (no pm's please)]

As another aside I would think that the 48x48 icons should be full colour, which will provide a contrast and keep things lively.

Probably as well any ALERT type icons in the 24x24 range should also be full colour.

Not sure what alerts there would be?

[Bravo]

[Bravo]

btw what other colours were you wanting for the icons as a base colour? I might as well knock them off while I am at it tomorrow..

[admin (no pm's please)]

I honestly think we need to worry about other colors later.

We are still at the sort of stage where can cannot actually see the icons live. It is still conceivable that when we do it will all look to hideously purple and we will realize that full colour is better.

It is a lot easy to scrap ideas and start afresh if we/you have not invested too much time.

This week coming will see a concerted effort by me to get some functionality on screen, which will then be a more useful point to go further.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Current needs are the pending request icon and a Delete button.

I guess we will need buttons for a lot of the actions!

[Bravo]

Been on a safety course today (will be tomorrow too), and will be looking after the kids as the wife has some work to catch up on, Wednesday will be the day I can really knuckle down on these so if anything comes to you with regards to what is needed post it up so I have a reference when I get to it. I know it all may change as and when you encounter any problems/mind changes, but that is fine, dont worry about it

[admin (no pm's please)]

No panic, I can use any old icons or none at all for ages yet. Just saying that those are the ones currently topping lists.

[Bravo]

I just thought I may as well give you some icons I made yesterday, they are 64x64. I wasn't altogether happy with them which is why I didn't post them up, but they may serve some use until I get some proper ones made.

Icon download link (in .zip folder)

[admin (no pm's please)]

A couple of male and female silhouette icons faces at 48x48 would be nice as well.

I'm trying for an interesting way of showing who is online.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Feel free to shoot this down, it rotates through who is online. The idea being that a limited amount of screenspace is used:


It may not be too clear but it uses a different height for each picture as if they are on a rotating wheel.

[Bravo]

Would that work well on slower internet connections? A lot of teenagers use laptops or access via college computers which arent always condusive to heavy requirement web pages.

[admin (no pm's please)]

We are talking icons that are about 3kb each at that size, and only one image is used per person, we simply use the height tag to compress things. The rotation is totally client side. e.g. aside from updating who is online occasionally, the client does all the work without communicating to the server.

So no I don't see load as an issue here.

[Bravo]

Cool, question asked, question answered.

In that case I think it is a great idea, nice little touch.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Please always ask about performance.

An example in this area is:

Question:

if you are updating who is online data every 10 seconds and that involves asking the database who someone friends are and whether they have a session table entry indicating they are online, then isn't that going to wreck you server approximately 3 days after you start running this service?

Answer:

Yes it would, but what we can do is make the client pass a secure datum with their friends list (which is after all largely constant) to the server and hence just query the session table against that list. e.g. query one smaller table rather than a large two table join.

[Bravo]

Couldn't find the blog that requested the 64x64 icons, so posting here:

Photobucket down atm, and imageshacks activation email not come through, so had to host at a crappy (image) host that turns your pic into jpg  

But you get the idea....this is the kind of lines I am thinking:

[admin (no pm's please)]

Is it just me that thinks that icon looks a bit "dodgey"?

[Bravo]

[Bravo]

*Hastily adds a cleaner version*

[admin (no pm's please)]

Console yourself with this special offer:

http://www.marksandspencer.com/gp/product/B000JQ5K00/