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Is it hard to code high color, alpha channel icons in MS Office?


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I saw the picture of the upcoming release of Outlook (pic), and I must say, it looks great. My only concern is that it still uses the same low color icons. Even the XP icons, such as the recycle bin, that are normally 32-bit, have been dulled down to low color, and I can only sit and wonder about one question: did the way MS programmed Office in previous releases somehow make it hard for them to enable 32-bit transparent icons in the new releases? I mean, Office X for the Mac has high color icons, and I don't think MS would be hesitant about adding them to Office for Windows. Since the icons in the lower-left hand corner have 32-bit icons in the picture, I can only hope that this picture is just a beta and that new icons will appear later. If anyone knows anything more about this, please enlighten me.... :)

Jason

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I don't think that it is very complicated for them to use high color icons. I suppose there are different design teams at work. If you think of the Office 2000 icons, they had only 2 colors and where very different to the normal windows icons.

I know that Excel has a build in limit for user colors for cells and borders etc., a max of 56 colors. Because of (vba) legacy code they didn't change this yet. But that has nothing to do with the icons I would say.

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well, at least they updated the icons :)

but i don't think it would be that difficult for them to use high color icons.

i have never seen that screenshot, btw. kinda looks cool.

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tmeg, thx for the info. I know there are different design teams, but why would they dull down the XP icons that are already made, such as the recycle bin? Since those icons were previously 32-bit, it made me think there was a coding difficulty.

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Thanks for that link. Yeah, it looks quite good.

Perhaps they will fix that icon isue. But I am shure, that would need additional coding (thus costs). If enough "bug reports" on this problem arrive they will perhaps change it. If not, the app still looks good (but not perfect) :-)

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