General chat forum on rw-designer

Vista and XP Icons

Technical questions

In your opinion is it still necessary to produce 16 and 256 color icons? I ask this because I haven't seen a computer in the last 10 years that can't display in 24 bit color. Occasionally I have faced old Win98SE systems but even they display in full color invariably they want to upgrade which in their case means buy a new discount system.)

In reading your articles it appears that Vista doesn't use 24x24 icons, is this so? At the same time I maintain several computers for elderly people on which I change the DPI to 120 for readability. Now with giant wide screens I find it necessary to do this for many users, one is so fine I have windows running at 144 DPI, e.g. 150%. The resulting blown up icons don't look as nice, is there any way to mitigate this. For reference I am thinking the messy ones are 256 color and sticking with full color and an alpha channel is better.

PS I clued in the person I make Icons for to your program, I supply him with the individual graphics in numerous variations, he picks the ones he likes but is using an antiquated shareware to package them into ico files.

Vlasta on May 6th 2008 0

I would not say it is necessary, but I would still recommend it. There are still situations, when the 256 or 16-colors icons are used. Running in less than 24 bit color is indeed scarce, but it sometimes happens when graphics adapter drivers are not functioning properly. A more important scenario is a remote desktop session, which usually runs in lower color depth. Also, Windows 2000 and earlier systems cannot properly use icons with alpha channel.

Since generating the pre-XP formats is one-click action and the space requirements are relatively low, I would stick with them.

Vista may use 24x24 icons if it happens to need them (maybe in Start menu, just as XP; or when running at 144 DPI - the small icons in Explorer are 24x24).

At higher resolutions, the icons in Vista are sometimes messy. I do not know exactly why, but it seems to sometimes cache the lower-res versions and not refreshes it after switching to higher resolution. Also, I believe that some updates did change the way the icons are handled in Vista. When running at 120 DPI I saw Vista switching desktop icon size from 48x48 to 60x60 and back without any action on my side. Weird. Also the desktop shortcuts created by installer look ugly and when I create a shortcut manually it is smooth. Experimentation is what delivers results in Vista (until the next update, it is a work in progress ;-)), I have not figured it out yet. Having the hi-res image in an icon and praying is a good strategy.