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.
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.
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:
- Simple Eye https://uxwing.com/view-icon/
- Thin line art eye https://uxwing.com/see-icon/
- Eye in “scanning square” (corners of a square are hinted, the eye is inside; typical “scanning square” for qr code scanners) https://uxwing.com/eye-scanning-icon/
- Binoculars https://uxwing.com/binoculars-icon/
- Spectacles https://uxwing.com/spectacles-icon/
- Happy man with VR glasses https://uxwing.com/virtual-reality-vr-icon/
- Old video recorder https://uxwing.com/video-camera-icon/
- Square with red dot insids and text record https://uxwing.com/screen-recorder-icon/
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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