Icons in Text

How to mix Icons and Text
If you've designed any type of user interface in Project Spark, you'll know that it can be somewhat painful. A simple "Press A to continue" where the A is the icon for the A button can be a time-consuming, frustrating "tweek and test" marathon.

TD has felt our pain and responded with a cool new system for mixing icons with text. I like to call it "Icon Tokens" and it works like this: IgxboSSee that [A] in that text? Project Spark will recognize that as a special token and replace it with the icon for the A button. No really! Try it! No more trying to line up icons with text (and worrying if it will still look good on the other guy's screen). Thank you Team Dakota!

Another little trick I found for creating UI's looks like this: qyyMQ6It conveniently uses whatever icon or object you choose as the background for the text. Tres cool, non?

OK, back to the icon tokens... by now, some of you more astute readers may be asking, "But Kafka, what if I want the actual text '[A]' to display, square brackets and all?" Never fear, dear astute reader, I got you covered. You can tell Project Spark that you want to show actual [ and ] by prefacing them with a backslash (ex. "Press \[a\] to continue"). So now there's no excuses. Get out there and start creating some really cool UI's that I can steal... er... admire!

To help get you started, I've compiled the following list of tokens after quite a bit of trial and error. If you discover any that aren't on this list, please let me know and I'll add them. Enjoy!
 * [A] (A button, case matters)
 * [a] (A key on keyboard)
 * [B]
 * [X]
 * [Y]
 * [left trigger]
 * [right trigger]
 * [any trigger]
 * [left bumper]
 * [right bumper]
 * [any bumper]
 * [left stick]
 * [right stick]
 * [any stick]
 * [left stick button]
 * [right stick button]
 * [any stick]
 * [D-pad up]
 * [D-pad right]
 * [D-pad down]
 * [D-pad left]
 * [mouse position]
 * [left mouse button]
 * [middle mouse button]
 * [right mouse button]
 * [mouse wheel]
 * [up direction]
 * [right direction]
 * [down direction]
 * [left direction]
 * [swipe]
 * [touch]
 * [WASD]
 * [arrow keys]
 * [arrow up]
 * [arrow right]
 * [arrow down]
 * [arrow left]
 * [numpad 2]
 * [numpad 4]
 * [numpad 6]
 * [numpad 8]
 * [e]
 * [q]
 * [1]
 * [2]
 * [3]
 * [4]
 * [W]
 * [A]
 * [S]
 * [D]
 * [health]
 * [walking]
 * [can walk]
 * [running]
 * [jump]
 * [jumping]
 * [jump height]
 * [swimming]
 * [flying]
 * [shoot]
 * [shooting]
 * [attacking]
 * [block]
 * [blocking]
 * [throw]
 * [throwing]
 * [falling]
 * [damage]
 * [light damage]
 * [medium damage]
 * [heavy damage]
 * [on land speed]
 * [on land acceleration]
 * [on land turn speed]
 * [speed]
 * [velocity]
 * [bump]
 * [see]
 * [detect]
 * [in trigger zone]
 * [age]
 * [add to list]
 * [allow friendly fire]
 * Don't forget you can escape the square brackets with \[ and \]

Icon number
Brasten discovered something new about icons. As you might already know, it is possible to put icons inside texts, and thus store icons inside text variables. But Brasten discovered how it was done: the text "" where you replace # with a number specific to each icon will store the icon. He was able to find that out by adding the text "<" before the image to get rid of the icon when you display the whole text.

WHEN DO [display] will display the 0 to 1 icon, as if you had set a text variable to the 0 to 1 icon from the gallery and then displayed that text variable.

WHEN DO [txt var: icon] [equals] [txt: "<"] [gallery picker: 0 to 1 icon] WHEN DO [display] [icon] will display "< "

Here are some numbers associated to the first icons from the icon gallery:

http://i.imgur.com/VodO0Gz.png

Brasten has been kind enough to share his world, where he displays the numbers associated to a lot of icons from the icon gallery: https://drive.google.com...rwzuVjZnb2lFVmNNa3M/view

And here's a spreadsheet to see the names of the icons, and the numbers associated to them (actually, they have not been added yet, feel free to do so to help): https://docs.google.com/...DK8Q/edit#gid=1486578434

I tried to look for a pattern, and here'ss what I found about these numbers: - they are 64 bit unsigned integers - their first bit is always 1 (so the numbers are between 2^63 and 2^64 - 1) With that, we know the numbers go from 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615

- Then, I found out that some icons are "consecutive", in the following sense: you add the constant STEP = 5,093,491,910,919,457 to go from one to the next. In the picture above, the number icons have the names 1, 2, 3, 4, and they are consecutive in the sense I gave as well. The keyboard icons 1, 2, 3, 4 are also consecutive.

I also looked at the icons from Keyboard 0 to Keyboard 9 and those are all consecutive.

- Finally, I saw that the keyboard icon a from the picture was not following the keyboard icon 4 directly, but it was 45*STEP more than 4, that is, an integer times STEP more than a previous icon. So I'm going to say that a "is a jumpy consecutive of" 4. I also have that Keyboard A is a jumpy consecutive of Keyboard 9, since Keyboard A = Keyboard 9 + 40*STEP

To do the calculus, I used http://calc.penjee.com/

I believe it would be great if we could find out more about those numbers, in order to understand how they have been generated. A good start would be to find all the groups of all consecutive icons, and the groups of jumpy consecutive groups of consecutive icons, and then we would be able to understand better how the jump from an icon to its jumpy consecutive works. Ultimately, we want to discover the pattern between icons that are not consecutive or jumpy consecutive and give the rules for how a number associated to an icon is generated.

It would also be interesting to look at the other galleries, and the icons of custom assemblies.