Raiders of the Lost Icon: search for long-forgotten iconic treasure!

[OneGeekArmy]

Here's my humble contribution to #MARCHintosh2023: Raiders of the Lost Icon (RotLI)

It's an adventure application for macOS 11.15 and up that lets you dig through the vast expanses of bytes of your disk images (and ROM files but shhhhhhh) to uncover the hidden icons that could be hiding there.

https://rotli.onegeekarmy.eu

Drag and drop a disk image and RotLI will display the bytes it contains as if they were icons. Most of the time, it will look like static, of course...

But sometimes, as you scroll through, you will encounter treasure:

You can bookmark your findings (to get back to them easily) and export them in a variety of formats:

- PNG (with transparency support for 1-bit icons), BMP and TIFF
- ASCII text (copy and paste icons in your IRC chats!)
- USDZ for Augmented Reality! Display your icons on the walls of your house or use them in your 3D modeling application (you could 3D print them, for example).

Icons can be also be viewed in 3D in RotLI itself (imagine being able to rotate this under every angle):

To get you started, here's a little video quickly going through the basics:

 

[OneGeekArmy]

1.2 Update​

Raiders of the Lost Icon now exports to SVG (for you vector freaks out there).

Its USDZ models are also considerably optimized and now load super fast. Impress your friends!

Finally , an issue was found in the auto-updater. If your RotLI complains, manually grab a fresh copy at:

Raiders of the Lost Icon

Raiders of the Lost Icon, finding iconic treasure in old bytes

rotli.onegeekarmy.eu

 

[retr01]

Raiders of the Lost Icon now exports to SVG (for you vector freaks out there).

Yay!!!!! I love vectors!

 

[OneGeekArmy]

Yay!!!!! I love vectors!

I do too!
I've been playing with the SVG output and it's kinda neat: the pixels are exported as individual squares so it's super easy to remove or group them.
And then you can easily make an STL of the whole thing and print them in 3D.

 

[Crutch]

This is cool!

An amazing enhancement would be to add some pretty basic machine learning logic to classify “things that are probably icons” vs. everything else, then put those right at the top! It would probably not be hard to do, since icons vs. white noise are very distinct. (Of course you could also just grab all the ICON++ resources but that’s cheating and also won’t catch everything)

 

[OneGeekArmy]

This is cool!

An amazing enhancement would be to add some pretty basic machine learning logic to classify “things that are probably icons” vs. everything else, then put those right at the top! It would probably not be hard to do, since icons vs. white noise are very distinct. (Of course you could also just grab all the ICON++ resources but that’s cheating and also won’t catch everything)

What a cool idea. I'll add it to the bucket list.

i purposely stayed away from grabbing icons from the resource forks (which is something that Disk Jockey is a lot more equipped to do in the future) because I also want to be able to find all the stuff that was marked as deleted by HFS but remains on disk.

I have come across some icon fragments in the noise. Parts of an application that is no longer on the disk. RotLI can salvage those, but a traditional application that deals with resource forks can't.

 

[Elemenoh]

This is a super cool project. It'd be great if you leveraged AI/ML to sort chunks of bits by entropy for likelihood of being an actual icon.

 

[OneGeekArmy]

This is a super cool project. It'd be great if you leveraged AI/ML to sort chunks of bits by entropy for likelihood of being an actual icon.

It would, wouldn't it?

...

...

Gee I wonder what this is doing here...

 

[OneGeekArmy]

v1.5 Update​

Since v1.2, Raiders of the Lost Icon has gained a few tricks:

- If you're a knitting fan, or a LEGO enthusiast, or if you're retiling your bathroom, you'll be pleased to know that it's now possible to export your icon images with a coordinates grid. It should make your icons easier to reproduce in the real world.

- It's now possible to export as a DAE file (for 3D modeling purposes)
- Added keyboard navigation in the giant list of icons (Pg Up, Pg Down, Home and End)
- Removed the bookmark file. RotLI now manages your bookmarks automatically and you no longer have to deal with the file containing them.