vista png icon support


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I thought Vista was going to support png icons. I know for a fact that some of the system icons are vector based because of how they are scaled. Does this not include other applications?

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thanks, well the other thing i noticed, is that on the desktop some icons will resize and other will have a transparent box around them and not resize like in thumbnail view

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You'd think microsoft would add full image icon support... Look at gnome or kde, they've had 32-bit PNG,GIF,BMP,TIFF icons as well as vector SVG icons for years.

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OK SO Vista does support PNG icons, but it's only recommended for larger icons due to legacy compatibility. So I'll assume that the smaller ones are all normal bitmap whereas the larger ones are PNG for file size considerations.

as to the icons with a border and a small icon in the middle, it's because a larger version icon isnt supplied and it cannot size the icon to any larger than what's displayed. This happens with most applications, because they were built for XP without the large icon support.

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Vista supports compressed 256x256px PNG icons natively. It has full backwards compatibility for use in non-Vista OS. Although the larger resolution can increase the size of icons considerably larger, therefore, it has been capped at 256px.

Vector icons are still technically unfeasible at the moment with the level of computing power we have today. Especially when there are thousands of icons in the system and at least 20 on-screen at any one time. This applies to the concept of vector UIs as well.

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ok, so as a test, I took a custom firefox icon png and ran it through iconworks, it made it vista compatible, When I go through my computer/desktop, I can resize it now no problem, but on the desktop it still has the square around it

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Vector icons are still technically unfeasible at the moment with the level of computing power we have today. Especially when there are thousands of icons in the system and at least 20 on-screen at any one time. This applies to the concept of vector UIs as well.

Not really, If you have a decent system, it's quite possible - at one point I had 40 SVG icons on my GNOME dock and when scaling it, it managed to re-render them at about 10fps.

And the vector UI - look up metacity. It has full vector support with gradients and runs VERY smoothly.

Of course, that's linux.

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Not really, If you have a decent system, it's quite possible - at one point I had 40 SVG icons on my GNOME dock and when scaling it, it managed to re-render them at about 10fps.

And the vector UI - look up metacity. It has full vector support with gradients and runs VERY smoothly.

Of course, that's linux.

Yeah, because 10 fps is amazing speed. Sheesh - did you even read what you wrote? Most people do not have powerful machines, y'know. This isn't a magical world where everyone has the latest model...

I especially like how you suddenly made it into a Linux thing. This has nothing to do with linux or windows :/

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Yeah, because 10 fps is amazing speed. Sheesh - did you even read what you wrote? Most people do not have powerful machines, y'know. This isn't a magical world where everyone has the latest model...

I especially like how you suddenly made it into a Linux thing. This has nothing to do with linux or windows :/

10fps is pretty damn good for redrawing 40 vector icons at a new size. I probably shouldn't have said powerful machine, I mean that was on my 3000+... I call that powerful :p

And I was just making a (fanboyish) statement with the linux comment - it's true though.

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I thought Vista was going to support png icons. I know for a fact that some of the system icons are vector based because of how they are scaled. Does this not include other applications?

someone really needs to do some research...

Vista's Icon scheme works like this

You have an ICO file with multiple sizes

16x16, 32x32,48x48,64x64,128x128 (not all required, vista recomments 16x16, 32x32 and 128x128 for smooth scaleing)

then there is a new addition to the ICO file called compressed PNG format which is stored inside the ICO file along with the other sizes but in a zipped up partion that stores it as a PNG stream at 256x256 in size at 32bit...

there is NO vector based icons there never was! the "vector" thing came from the fact the OS is now drawn in a 3D field, which uses ta-da vectors to mark the points on it, this is not "vector" in the terms of vector art, but a mear point system... the icons are scaled using "vectors" by looking for common points in the image and saying ok these match so when i scale this they should be the same... then it does its interpolation and all that fun stuff between all the available sizes and the vista png size and creates a new icon size at any size based on those images if you provide at lease the basic sizes of 16x16,32x32 and 128x128.. 256x256 is not required but is recommended.....

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10fps is pretty damn good for redrawing 40 vector icons at a new size. I probably shouldn't have said powerful machine, I mean that was on my 3000+... I call that powerful :p

And I was just making a (fanboyish) statement with the linux comment - it's true though.

:D

Still, you get my point though - it's not feasible for most people, thus would be a waste of MS resources atm :(

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