Comparison with realfavicongenerator.net & feature roadmap ideas #108
Description
I've used Icon Genie in a recent PWA project which was great kick start (!) but found I that for my graphics it fell short of the mark in few important areas - some of which realfavicongenerator.net filled in and yet some features in realfavicongenerator.net were missing that Icon Genie covered - so I think I'm now forced to manually merge and configure the two image sets. This is not so much a feature request but rather a suggestion that you might want to do a review of realfavicongenerator.net and consider which of their features would be most useful to add to the Icon Genie roadmap. Actually realfavicongenerator.net has done lots of the research which you could leverage and I don't expect you'd necessarily want to implement everything they did as their goals were different to yours.
Here's the features I valued from realfavicongenerator.net
- Option to place icon images in the root folder (recommended by realfavicongenerator.net).
- Allow SVG format as input source image
- Idea: Would be awesome to able to search & select and color an SVG icon from all the Quasar Icon sets. You've already done the work of splitting the font files! http://fa2png.io/ used to do stuff like this but their site is now down :( .
- Option to use a different input source image for a given platform. Often needed!
- Option to use a different input source image for the smaller favicons. Badly needed!
- Specify per platform: theme or background color, transparency, image scaling and padding.
- For my project, this was the main reason I had to switch from Icon Genie.
- Support for Windows Store, Firefox apps (see the realfavicongenerator.net API), Yandex.
- Safari Pinned Tab
"pictureAspect": "silhouette" - Windows Store & IE/Edge: Emits browserconfig.xml with 5 mstile image sizes. and option to silhouette your image. SVG is perfect as the input source for this.
- Firefox app: Emits
manifest.webappfile that links to firefox app images (60x60, 128x128, 512x512)
Here's what I found missing from realfavicongenerator.net that Icon Genie has
- No splash screen images?!
- Option to use a different input source image for the splash screen. Badly needed!
- Missing sizes: favicon-96x96.png (Important for Windows PWA shortcut), 167x167(iOS iPad Pro), 128x128 (Android Chrome)
- realfavicongenerator.net image compression options are not as good as Icon Genie.
- Their API image processing engine is not open source - at least I couldn't find it.
Integration Pain (Quasar CLI bug?)
I tried to place the icons from realfavicongenerator.net into the root folder for a Quasar PWA and found that the PWA builder ignored the paths (and theme color) I set in quasar.config.js and instead linked to /statics/icons/ instead of / and ignore the file names I set forcing me to use rename the emitted images to the names used by Icon Genie. Yes! I'd uninstalled Icon Genie. Might follow up with a separate bug issue for this.
Online GUI
Probably biggest win for realfavicongenerator.net is their GUI that allows you to view and configure the images settings online for each platform, then download the config and run it locally or in CI/CD via their CLI app. Not sure if you have the time or energy for this. An alternative might be to create a replacement to Icon Genie that integrates with their API (and GUI) that smoothly integrates with Quasar config. Not sure how responsive they are to getting mods done to pull this off and maintain it or if you'd want to go down this path but if you're too busy doing other cool Quasar things it might be a preferred option.