Custom app icons have been discussed as a feature for TI-84 Plus CE shells (or at least briefly mentioned) a few different times in the past, and yet that there still isn't any public standard. With the increase in shells and custom apps for the TI-84 Plus CE lately, with CEaShell, CelticCE, (and VYSION 2 possibly becoming an app soon?), RoccoLox Programs and I have had an idea for formatting that could be used for CEaShell and CelticCE (along with other custom apps like Cesium), which we'd like to mention and get some feedback on before working it into those apps, and adding support for those icons in CEaShell as well.
After looking at currently existing app code, we see no problem with using the same icon structure as ASM program icons, and given that all shells use 8bpp colors for displaying icons anyway, we see no problem with using the same color palette, though if anyone more experienced with apps sees any issue with this, please let us know.
Obviously the header would be slightly modified, as apps should not support descriptions (App copyright is essentially already a description), so here's a quick overview of what it would look like:
Code:
It would probably be good to incorporate this format into shells that display apps in them, such as Cesium, and it would also be good to include support for icons in the app_tools section of the CE C toolchain to allow compiled C apps to have icons as well.
As mentioned before, we'd like to hear some feedback on this idea from people who have worked with apps, along with people who have worked on CE shells as to whether anything with the formatting should be changed or something taken into account that we did not think of.
After looking at currently existing app code, we see no problem with using the same icon structure as ASM program icons, and given that all shells use 8bpp colors for displaying icons anyway, we see no problem with using the same color palette, though if anyone more experienced with apps sees any issue with this, please let us know.
Obviously the header would be slightly modified, as apps should not support descriptions (App copyright is essentially already a description), so here's a quick overview of what it would look like:
Code:
jp appStart ; skip icon data
db 1 ; signify app has an icon
db 16, 16 ; width, height of icon
db ; 256 bytes of icon data goes here
appStart:
...
App code hereIt would probably be good to incorporate this format into shells that display apps in them, such as Cesium, and it would also be good to include support for icons in the app_tools section of the CE C toolchain to allow compiled C apps to have icons as well.
As mentioned before, we'd like to hear some feedback on this idea from people who have worked with apps, along with people who have worked on CE shells as to whether anything with the formatting should be changed or something taken into account that we did not think of.
