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Flags


eng

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i agree with eng about the aspect ratio. changing that will make flags look strange in proportion to one another, and leads to false conclusions about them. for example, that square red flag with the white cross looks really strange next to the others.

having the flags all different sizes will also make the set as a whole look unprofessional, as if it's pieced together.

I have to disagree, but i am, of course, biased. :D

It may look strange if they are displayed one after another like on my sample picture, but it looks great in the utorrent list. Well, i have tweaked it since last time. I already made the swiss flag smaller, maybe i will make it just a bit smaller again.

Many skins for the tabs or the toolbar also use icons of different size. I don't think they look pieces together as long as the design is consistent. And i don't like skins where the icons all have the same size. It is bad for quick recognition of the icons.

I strongly disagree with the false conclusions you would get from the aspect ratio. The opposite is right. Some flags are very similar in color and appearance but are not the same if it comes to the aspect ratio. Ireland and Italy e.g. If you don't know the flags it won't help you. But if you know them, especially the one of your own country, you will recognize them faster with the correct aspect ratio. I also emphasises the diversity of the flags.

But i agree that a flag set with all the flags having the same size can also look nice. But i don't think the sets i have seen have done a good job at it.

I am not a profesional but IMO my set doesn't look more unprofessional than the others. It is just less "iconified" and closer to the real thing :)

IMO many flags look wrong if you always stretch them to the same size. The french flag stretched to 16 pixels width will have one column that is 20% bigger than the other ones. This is noticable and the flags looks more strange than having a 15px width flag beside one with 16px width. The missing pixel in width is only about 6% of the total width. You won't even notice this in the list view of the program, but you will most certainly notice a wrong width of a single column. At least, i have noticed this immediatly.

The same applies to the german flag (my home country) but vertically. And there are other problems like the malaysian flag that has an even number of narrow colored rows. The US flag has an odd number of rows.

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I'd like to propose to map all YU entries to CS instead.

yu is the ccTLD of Yugoslavia that ceased to exist in 2003. Of course, they didn't shut down all yu domains, so they are used until today. The former Yugoslavia is now known as Serbia and Montenegro, that country uses the old yu and the newer cs ccTLD. In the WHOIS entries of some domains there are still references to Yugoslawia, but these are domains registered before 2003. But several domains are mapped to YU despite that the fact that the WHOIS info says CS.

IMO it makes to sense to map the domains to the old ccTLD.

BTW:

hanta.com|AU

PS: eng, may i use/point to your flags.conf if i am going to release my own flags?

Edited by Mugros
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[quoting the previous post is spam - quote removed]

Both ccTLD are in the .conf and are the same flag (at least for my .bmp). As for the mapping being wrong: I put what people tell me, and I haven't verified them all, I'm just happy they display the correct flag :)

Sure you can use my .conf, and let me know if you'd like any changes made to it: missing ccTLD in particular.

I can't really say much about the aspect ratio since they're your flags so you're free to do what you want, but at 16x16 it's just not possible to properly display each flag's correct ratio without it looking strange.

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I just wanted to give a reason, why i think it should be CS instead of YU. No offense.

Thanks. Actually i have started my own flags.conf. I made the 00 flag look weird and now i can see all com/net/org domains that are not mapped to a country. I also map them to US if necessary. This way i have only correct flags displayed.

Comparing both confs should be easy with a diff tool.

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Yes.

utorrent only looks at the TLD.

uTorrent could make a whois lookup but this would be overkill. And even whois records are no guarantee for a correct country code. I had several peers that had a domain that was registered e.g. in the US but the IP resolved to a computer on the phillipines. The whois record for a domain links it to one country but every computer in this domain could be in a different country. Even the peers with ccTLDs can be located anywhere on earth. So it is always a little inaccurate.

Azureus has a country plugin that has AFAICS a database with the country codes for the IP ranges. This is fairly accurate, i guess. But the database is still multiple times bigger than utorrent, still under 1MB.

I changed the 00 flag that is the default for every non-ccTLD, so i see at a glance if there is a domain i have to lookup. Soon i had most of the major ISPs. Maybe sometimes i count the entries, but i think about 25% of the domains that default to US via the 00 flag are non-US.

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I use http://www.freeke.org/cgi-bin/whois

I know whois.sc and i had some inconsistent IP location results. The above links only shows the whois records and then i use some common sense to pick a flag. Most of the time it is the country of the registrant. But sometimes this doesn't fit. e.g. the registrant for some ISP in the caribean sea is in France, but the ISP is in the caribean sea on some island. So i pick the island flag if available.

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and why not .nu etc domains?

Simply because it doesn't work.

And even if it does work, there are only rare cases where this would be used.

If the swedish ISP thinks using Nieu domains is cool, it's their problem. (nu means now in english)

I think you have to live with that wrong flag then.

There are several other cases where the flag is not correct. e.g. Tiscali is an italian company but is active in other countries. Since you can only remap the domain, not subdomains, everything with tiscali will get the italian flag.

I also found several domains with bogus whois entries.

This whole flag thing isn't fool-proof. There will be always some wrong flags.

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