Under Construction
Beginning version 6.7, IGB has a welcome screen that shows images representing species and their latest genome version. When a user clicks on an image representing a species, IGB displays the latest genome for that species.
To add a new image to the welcome screen follow these directions:
The term $IGB_HOME refers to the root directory where you placed IGB's source code. Refer to Get the code (for testing only) for instructions on getting IGB's source code.
The welcome screen reads its data set configuration from $IGB_HOME/common/resources/display_species.txt.
The text file is tab-separated. Each line corresponds to an image to be displayed by the welcome screen. Lines beginning with the pound sign (#) are ignored as comment lines.
- The file should have three entries separated by a tab character.
<picture_path><tab><species data set name><tab><display label name><tab><color> - picture_path: the picture path is relative to $IGB_HOME/common/resources/images. The specifications for the picture should be:** PNG format** 400x266 (height x width) full-bleed ANN's NOTE: Change this to 250 pixels height and variable width. See IGB Images DropBox for images created by Ann and a PowerPoint presentation with URLs to the images. Can we use JPG instead to save space? If yes, we need to convert the PNGs to JPG.
- The species data set name can be taken from the version combo box in IGB. This key is important for the welcome component to tell IGB which data set should be loaded when the user clicks on it. If IGB displays "Species name Not Available" on the status bar, there could be a typo on this field, or the data source may not be loaded.
- The label should be the name of the species. This value is not used as key, so you should not worry about this setting when troubleshooting. But obviously it should be realistic.
- Color for the text: make sure to pick a color that contrasts with the bottom part of the picture. The color is set following html rules ( of format: #123FAD) without alpha channel.
Once the three parameters are entered, IGB will display the new data set the next time it is started.
Here is the sample text from the current display_species.txt:
Here is a sample picture:
If there is any failure to read the picture, a default picture is shown.
How to collect and create images using Gimp
To support a new species, follow these steps:
Search wikipedia commons for a species. Obtain an image and save the original.
Open it in Gimp. Select a region using the rectangular selection tool, copy the selected region, and create a new image using File > Create > From ClipBoard.
Choose Image > Scale Image and set height to 250 pixels. Save image as PNG and name it g_species.png following the pattern in display_species.txt.
Next, save image as a JPEG. Add all three images (original, resized PNG, and resized JPG) to your archive. Insert the original image and its the URL in the PowerPoint document (see IGB Images DropBox) that serves as our archive of images for IGB start screen.
Only use images that are in the public domain.
To request access to the IGB images DropBox, contact Ann Loraine.