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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 ?
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.
When the Xerox Star came out, it had icons because they had been proposed in a PhD thesis by David Smith.