Edit: Wow! Literally few days after posting, there are already several open PR and quite a few great suggestions. Huge thanks to all of you, the FOSS community really rocks!

Original post:

TLdR. Nothing major, just needs help finding an app icon.

I’m developing VScan, a little project aiming to research how vision LLMs could help out blind people on travel and in their every-day life by substituting eyesight for various visual tasks.

My project is not a “magical AI app” which is going to solve every problem on the click of a button. In fact, I don’t use the “AI branding” at all, because I think it’s very misleading for the general audience. It’s more of an experiment to find out if the blind people could use LLMs as tools for visual cognition in a way that would be useful.

I’m trying to be as clear and specific as I can about the used technology, and providing as much customization as possible without sacrificing convenience. Of course, the project is completely open-source, does not collect any user data and while the first generations only supported GPT models, because that was the only thing usable for vision at the time, the current dev version already supports defining an arbitrary LLM provider (including a self-hosted server), and the ability to choose any model supported by the respective provider.

I’m facing just one major issue. I’m blind myself, coding the app as my personal tool. And I’m having quite a hard time finding an app icon that would work on the modern Android systems and setting it up properly. To be honest, I’m quite lost in the various suggested standards, there are the ordinary raster PNG icons, vector based SVG icons, and these days Android seems to also have some multi-part contextual XML based icons which as far as I understand should adapt to the different screens, configurations, themes etc. but I genuinely have no idea where to find these and sofar whatever I tried ended up as some undefinable point cloud on the screen.

Normally I wouldn’t care about such things, but having an app icon is the requirement for getting accepted into app stores like F-Droid or Google Play, and subsequently, to the users. Nobody these days is willing to side-load apps anymore.

If anybody with Android development experience could take a look on this, I would be very grateful. All that’s needed to do is finding a suitable icon on one of the icon portals, preferably in shape of an eye, or a camera (the one used to mark video recording), although the exact appearance doesn’t really matter, the users won’t see it anyway. It can be free or paid, as far as the price is reasonable. Then you can either open a PR yourself (the project does not require anything special to build, it’s just the ordinary Android Studio stuff), or you could explain to me how to implement the icons and I will try to follow.

Thanks for your attention! I apologize if this is not the right place to post this, mods feel free to remove if necessary.

  • Eyedust@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    23 hours ago

    Let me take a fresh look at this in the morning. I’m having the itch to get up, boot up Inkscape and get something going via vector, but my sleep schedule will be completely screwed if I do that.

    I’ll try to set an alarm or something, as I have pretty severe and unmedicated ADHD, but if someone could reply to this as well, as an extra reminder, I’d be grateful. I’ll probably remember when I open the app tomorrow, but better safe than sorry.

    Its not often I get the itch to draw, but this really leaps out at me and I want to try. I have an idea of how I’d go about it. An eye looking slightly skyward with Earth as the pupil (if it hasn’t been done for something else yet). I don’t know if it’s within my skill, though.

    Also, I believe there’s a way to translate vector to XML. I think I did it once when I was making a custom theme for MusicBee, but I’ll have to look again to be sure.

    • Eyedust@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      9 hours ago

      An unfinished eye with globe as the pupil. Only South America is done on the globe.

      This was what I was thinking. Vectoring the continents takes a bit of time, but it’s pretty fun, actually. I want to get some iris details in there, but would also like a bit of feedback from the community.

      If you already have something else, that’s good as well. I honestly am having fun making this and I needed to get back into vector art anyway.

      • RastislavKish@lemmy.mlOP
        2·
        6 hours ago

        Thanks for your work and interest! 😁 There are already two open PR, so thanks to the amazing community, I quickly got from the situation of having no choices to choosing from several alternatives.

        I really love the idea of the eye’s pupil being represented by the globe in your proposal. It evokes in me the feeling of all the glamorous world being perceived through one’s eyes, all the stunning beauty that can be brought to a human only through vision. Which is exactly what I want to achieve with my app, bringing to people the world which can be experienced only through the eyesight.

        However, I think the app icon is actually too small space for this. You know, people have gazillion apps installed, the icons become super-tiny, the Earth would be barely recognizable and it wouldn’t communicate the idea. I think a much better place for this would be the project’s graphical banner, which is much larger, and serves exactly the purpose of communicating the app’s purpose through interesting graphics. Play store definitely does have this, and I think f-Droid too. I usually put some non-sense there, because I’m lazy to look for something proper. But if you’re in a drawing mood and feel inspired, I believe my project could absolutely utilize your work! 😉

        • Eyedust@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          1·
          5 hours ago

          I agree with you on that point. I got overly ambitious and have always wondered about making my own icon pack. When you do release, you should reach out to Delta icons in F-Droid and see if you can get your app requested! Everone gets one app request for free, and the project is completely free and open source.

          I’ll post a finished product when it’s done if you want to use it anywhere. You can freely have it and license it under your project if you wish. I’ll try to finish it by tomorrow, and in the meantime if you have any other requests for art that you need, do not hesitate to ask. I think this is an amazing idea, and honestly could see other utilization for it.

          For example, a color naming tool for the colorblind. With the way AI is, it could present examples of things of that color. For example, a lime green could show a tennis ball, bright grass, and other such samples. Could possibly used in aiding colorblind individuals in painting or digital art (though the paintings that come from a fully colorblind artist are wild and really cool when they just pick from the grays that look good to them).

  • manxu@piefed.socialEnglish
    31·
    3 days ago

    I’m facing just one major issue. I’m blind myself, coding the app as my personal tool.

    I am sorry, but this is just absolutely incredible. Do you have a channel somewhere where you talk about how you do it? I’d love to know more.

    • RastislavKish@lemmy.mlOP
      1·
      5 hours ago

      Thanks! 😃 I don’t think I’ve really ever talked or have written anything about developing without sight. In the blind community, it’s a fairly common skill which is not very special, so I’m usually either straight up writing about my projects or giving technical insights on various topics for people without explicit coding background.

      Development without eyesight is pretty similar to the normal development. We do not have fancy things like WYSIWYG interface designers, but good devs rarely use those anyway, whether you use VisualStudio, VS Code, Vim or anything else, the general idea of programming is simply working with text in various languages, and blind people are really good in that discipline. Writing programs is essentially just instructing the computer what to do under different circumstances, so it’s more a matter of being able to logically, exactly and accurately express one’s ideas and intentions, which is a skill not related to the eyesight.

      So, if you’ve ever seen a blind person taking notes or composing a textual document, programming is pretty much the same, except we call the compiler from time to time and get a working (or almost working 😃) program as a result.

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
    20·
    3 days ago

    It’s been a while, but I believe you do need the annoying new XML/SVG thing as it also doubles as the splash screen animation when you open an app as well. You can embed a PNG in those but vector is preferred because of screen resolutions.

    Wishing you great success with your app, disabilities are wildly underserved especially in open-source.

    • ThyTTY@lemmy.world
      11·
      3 days ago

      Correct, SVG is the way. You can easily export it in Android Studio to make a mipmap launcher app with dynamic shape. I can help with configuring that if needed, but once the desired icon is found

      • RastislavKish@lemmy.mlOP
        1·
        5 hours ago

        So an SVg icon can be automatically converted into the Android adaptive icon? That would explain where they’re supposed to come from.

  • Vegafjord eo@lemmy.ml
    6·
    3 days ago

    If the symbolism doesnt matter that much to you, you could use the letter “v” as the icon.

    Here I found a black on white drawing of a handsign for the letter v under Creative Commons by Erik Bolstad, Store Norske Leksikon.

    handsign for the letter v

  • VoxAliorum@lemmy.ml
    6·
    3 days ago

    Hey, I had my struggles with app icons as well when I wrote a small app for myself so I am not really equipped to create the PR (also due to current time limitations). If no one is found for that, I can give it a shot at the end of the year, but I am sure you will find someone sooner than that.

    However, I know of a free icon website and have looked through their icons to suggest a few to you:

    Uxwings license is amazing: https://uxwing.com/license/ you can use the icons for basically anything and can even alter them.

    Personally, I like “Eye in “scanning square”” the most as it symbolizes the technical aspect of scanning/capturing the surroundings.

    While I haven’t used it yetis, there is also https://icon.kitchen/ for icon generation.

  • Haradion@lemmy.ml
    6·
    3 days ago

    I’m no designer, but I’ll see if I can whip up something reasonable in Inkscape. I think I’ve got a handle on the process to turn an SVG image into an adaptive icon.

    • Haradion@lemmy.ml
      7·
      2 days ago

      Interesting. Looks like the existing icon was already adaptive, so the actual changes are pretty straightforward.

      Anyway, here’s my take on the design:

  • Shady_Shiroe@lemmy.world
    4·
    3 days ago

    I’m not really a designer, and even if you don’t care about icon, I think it still needs to be good, here is a website someone can use to make a pretty good and simple app icon and export it to all the platforms they need as it automatically makes it the correct size and file name that you extract and add to project: https://icon.kitchen/