View article

A means and method for generating and displaying a con tentbased depiction of a standard icon on the display of a computer is described. The depiction is generated upon the occurrence of predetermined events, such as the closure of the document or? le associated with the icon, and is dis played in either a static or animated form in place of the standard icon in response to selection signals from a selec tion device. A single content-based depiction of an icon is generated by creating a representation of the object (? le or document) to be depicted, and translating this representation into a scaled-down replica of the representation. This rep resentation may be in the form of a bit-map, a full-scale image, etc. The replica is created by partitioning the repre sentation into a number of equal segments, measuring the percentages of diiferent colors (black and white, gray scale, or color) within each segment, and assigning …