HCA Admin
Sep 01, 2009, 01:22 PM
Summary
HCA supplies over 45 icons for your use in representing devices, programs, and groups on your floors. We knew we could not anticipate all your needs so HCA comes with Icon Themes. This feature is documented in the User Guide but is really very simple. In the HCA installation is a folder called "Icon Themes". Within that folder are the theme folders. Within the theme folders are bitmap files. Each bitmap file is an icon that HCA can display. The filenames of the bitmap files becomes the icon names.
To add an icon to a theme all you need do is to place the new bitmap file in the theme folder and either restart HCA or, select from the menu HCA - Properties and on the Theme tab is a button to cause HCA to reload all the themes.
This also means that you can easily modify any existing HCA icon. Just edit the file and reload the themes.
Designing your own icons
The hardest part of adding icons to HCA is being able to draw what you want with a paint program. Simply put, it is a lot harder than you might think! The icons used in HCA to represent devices, programs, and groups were created by a graphic artist.
Before you start creating icons it is important to understand a few terms:
Icon or Bitmap
In HCA the pictures that represent each device in your design is called an icon. The pictures themselves are created from Windows bitmap files. Windows does have an icon file type but that is not the same thing. When you create your own icons you must create a file of type bitmap. These are usually with a .BMP file type.
Transparent color
This is the color in the icon that is replaced with the background color. By replacing the transparent color with the background color (as selected by you in the HCA properties dialog in the color tab) the icon appears to blend into the background rather than appear as a icon on a colored square. It's important to remember that any pixels of this color anywhere in the bitmap is replaced with the background color when the icon is drawn.
Representations
Each HCA built-in icon is used to represent a device in each one of its states: ON, OFF, or DIM. As described above, this is done by drawing a colored box around the icon with the ON color when ON, the DIM color when DIM, and the window background color (selectable by you) when the device is OFF. But the icon need not have the same representation for on, off, and dim. A good example of this is the garage door icon which has a different representation in the ON state than the OFF state. The representation of the icon is contained, like the icon name, in the filename. For example the garage door files are named "Garage Door_On" and "Garage Door_Off".
It depends upon what you are creating the icon for and how you want it to appear when you decide to draw all its representations yourself or allow HCA to create them for you from the OFF representation.
A good way to get started is to take one of the built-in HCA icons and modify it to your needs.
You can use the Windows paint program to create or modify icons. It offers only very limited drawing options but for simple icons or small modification it does work. Make sure with whatever drawing program you use that the file is saved as a 24 bit or true color bitmap.
When you add icons to HCA you must make them the same size as the theme. In each theme is a file called theme.txt which tells the size of the icons in the theme. If a bitmap file is a different size, HCA expands or crops it to fit the icon theme size.
HCA supplies over 45 icons for your use in representing devices, programs, and groups on your floors. We knew we could not anticipate all your needs so HCA comes with Icon Themes. This feature is documented in the User Guide but is really very simple. In the HCA installation is a folder called "Icon Themes". Within that folder are the theme folders. Within the theme folders are bitmap files. Each bitmap file is an icon that HCA can display. The filenames of the bitmap files becomes the icon names.
To add an icon to a theme all you need do is to place the new bitmap file in the theme folder and either restart HCA or, select from the menu HCA - Properties and on the Theme tab is a button to cause HCA to reload all the themes.
This also means that you can easily modify any existing HCA icon. Just edit the file and reload the themes.
Designing your own icons
The hardest part of adding icons to HCA is being able to draw what you want with a paint program. Simply put, it is a lot harder than you might think! The icons used in HCA to represent devices, programs, and groups were created by a graphic artist.
Before you start creating icons it is important to understand a few terms:
Icon or Bitmap
In HCA the pictures that represent each device in your design is called an icon. The pictures themselves are created from Windows bitmap files. Windows does have an icon file type but that is not the same thing. When you create your own icons you must create a file of type bitmap. These are usually with a .BMP file type.
Transparent color
This is the color in the icon that is replaced with the background color. By replacing the transparent color with the background color (as selected by you in the HCA properties dialog in the color tab) the icon appears to blend into the background rather than appear as a icon on a colored square. It's important to remember that any pixels of this color anywhere in the bitmap is replaced with the background color when the icon is drawn.
Representations
Each HCA built-in icon is used to represent a device in each one of its states: ON, OFF, or DIM. As described above, this is done by drawing a colored box around the icon with the ON color when ON, the DIM color when DIM, and the window background color (selectable by you) when the device is OFF. But the icon need not have the same representation for on, off, and dim. A good example of this is the garage door icon which has a different representation in the ON state than the OFF state. The representation of the icon is contained, like the icon name, in the filename. For example the garage door files are named "Garage Door_On" and "Garage Door_Off".
It depends upon what you are creating the icon for and how you want it to appear when you decide to draw all its representations yourself or allow HCA to create them for you from the OFF representation.
A good way to get started is to take one of the built-in HCA icons and modify it to your needs.
You can use the Windows paint program to create or modify icons. It offers only very limited drawing options but for simple icons or small modification it does work. Make sure with whatever drawing program you use that the file is saved as a 24 bit or true color bitmap.
When you add icons to HCA you must make them the same size as the theme. In each theme is a file called theme.txt which tells the size of the icons in the theme. If a bitmap file is a different size, HCA expands or crops it to fit the icon theme size.