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A History of Icons
John H. Doe writes "The GUIdebook has a great page illustrating the history of icons. Of course, they have the Lisa/Mac/OS X paths, but there's the Windows progressions, along with entries for NeXT, OS/2, BeOS, and yes, Linux. Would you call it progress?"
Or if you don't like this slashdot article, you can read the same one that was posted on slashdot exactly one year ago (well, almost exactly)
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
That's because the Windows .ico format is a complex meta-format with the capacity for multiple icon sizes and color depths. Paint Is just a rudimentary application like notepad and has never been the target of much improvement by MS.
The best Windows tool for editing icons is Microangelo. There is a shareware trial version available.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Well, I have found a few freeware ICO editing programs, but really you don't need them unless you want a multi-size icon (one that looks good in both a toolbar and in a folder).
.bmp to .ico.
It turns out that Windows can read BMPs as ICOs. Just make a BMP of the right size (16x16, 32x32, or 64x64) and rename the extension from
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As for my most used icons: Giving all my hard disks a icon with the drive letter on it. Makes using a tool bar (I have a "goto" toolbar that links to every drive and a few important folders) easy to locate which drive is which (I only have 6 partitions/hard drives on my windows box).
The Dogcow's name is Clarus, it simply makes the sound "Moof" :) It's a common misconception.
If you like icons, you should check out Susan Kare's page She made most of the original MacOS icons, as well as most of the original Windows icons. Lots of great pixel art.
I design the icons in .png then convert them to .ico with png2ico
works both on *nix and windows. You can also add several different image sizes in the icon file you make with this program.
Use the gimp... its free and supports this format. I made my own Shuffle icon for my pc so it would look more like it does in OSX.
This page is a useful guide if you ever need to create icons for Windows XP. It gives information on style, perspective and colours needed to make icons consistent with that OS. They recommend an app called GifMovieGear to create the actual icon files.
I think that says it all.
Why not just use mirrordot.org ?
I'll give a specific example that isn't really windows, but still bugs me. phpMyAdmin is an excellent piece of software that really makes my life easier. But a few versions ago they made a change that really bugs me. Before, if you were looking at a database, it could list all of the different tables in a chart, and it'd have links for all the different options (browse, insert, search, drop, empty, etc). Then one day I logged in and it was updated. All those quick little text links were replaced with tiny 16x16 icons. And they aren't even good icons. The icon for empty is a trashcan on top of some weird looking window. It's arguable whether or not a trashcan is a good symbol for empty, but regardless of that, the stupid window in the background makes it illegible. A finger pointing at a piece of paper stands for "structure"?
/. replacing the Submit and Preview button text with little images. What would be the point?
There are six commands in that table that they icon-ified. They saved maybe a few pixels of horizontal space, but I don't think they were hurting for room anyways. And it's a big step backwards in terms of usability and intuitiveness.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So isn't it overkill to use an image to replace one single word? How is that supposed to make things any easier?
It'd be like
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
DISCLAIMER: This is off-topic, yet related.
Now that I have it, all I wanted to say is that we (the 'slashdotters') need to agree to some common courtesy.
Yes, I'm talking about the 'slashdot effect'.
That each time we, who post something, take the 'common courtesy' of at least Coral CDN [mirror it].
And, no it's not that hard at all, either!
all that 'we' have to do is: http://redirect.nyud.net:8090/?url=${SUBSTITUTE_WI TH_URL} (see footnotes for more info...)
See, not that hard, really. If it wheren't I would have taken *this time to ask for you attention.
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*) ...and if you got 'Konqueror' create a (new) shortcut (like so): :P) :P)
'Searh provider name' == 'Coral CDN' (or enter your own name
'Search URI' == 'http://redirect.nyud.net:8090/?url=\{@}'
'URI shortcuts' == 'cdn,mirror,mirr' (or, again, pick your own 'web shortcuts'
so, now all you konqi's have to do is 'mirr: ${URL} '
*) .. and for all you Firefox'rs, here's a searchplugin for you'vs too: coral.src & coral.gif [add them to your 'Mozilla Searchplugins'-dir]
*) .. and you with other browser, I don't know much about others to comment about. But if you use an enhanced browser (eg. not-IE :-) *blow below the belt, I know, I know =)*), you might be able to add it yourself, someway, like with 'Konqueror'. But I wouldn't know about it, so I leave this up to you'vs.
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
You can make an icon in paint. an icon is a bmp with the extension changed. The first pixel in the upper left denotes the transparency. Granted it won't give you sizability, but if all you icons are 48x48, just make it 48x48, and save it with a .ico extension. :)
'I don't want more choices. I just want better things.' - Edina Monsoon
Weboso (aka Jairo Boudewyn) is the creative force behind those. DeviantArt has a sprawling interface, so here's a direct link to his Gallery.:)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
try snico at http://www.snidesoft.com it is freeware
Thats not true. ICO files have 2 channels per image (an XOR mask and an AND mask) plus other data different from BMP, such as the number of sizes and colors in the
Morphing Software
When the Xerox Star came out, it had icons because they had been proposed in a PhD thesis by David Smith.