Icon Editors

Icon editors are useful to create the icons for your application ‚ s forms, the main application window, menus , dialogs, the About screen, and the EXE. Otherwise, your users see the native ‚“Windows Icon ‚½ in the application. Icons add to the professionalism of your applications.

Axialis IconWorkshop

Axialis Software

Axialis IconWorkshop enables you to create and edit icons in many different sizes and color depths including Windows XP-style icons with smooth transparency. We like this tool ‚ s integrated workspace where the icon editing region, tools, color palette, etc. are all available in one window. We also like the clean way it manages multiple formats for a given icon and its ability to import and export several other image formats including bitmaps (BMP). If you ‚ re an expert, you can start being productive right away, and if you ‚ re a novice IconWorkshop comes with a good tutorial that can help you get up to speed quickly on working with icons. More information is available at www.axialis.com . The 30-day shareware version can be downloaded from this site and the full version is US$35 (personal) or US$60 (corporate).

IconStudio

CoffeeCup Software, Inc.

We like the icon editor and the ability it has to create the higher resolution icons used by Windows XP. You can rotate icons, flip the image vertically or horizontally, and invert colors. There is a decent icon library browser included as well. More information is available at www.coffeecup.com/freestuff/ . The tool can be downloaded from this site and is free.

Image Editor

Microsoft Corporation

We used Image Editor for years ; ever since it was included with Visual FoxPro (it is included on the Visual FoxPro 5 and Visual Studio 97 CD-ROMs). While this program is a bit dated(only handles images up to 32x32 pixels), it does a great job resizing images when you need to copy a 32x32 image to a 16x16 image. We keep it around for just this purpose.

Microangelo

Eclipsit Corporation

Microangelo is the complete package as far as icon editors are concerned . It has all the expected features like color palettes, preview mode, a full array of tools to fill in the pixels, and rotation and flip capabilities. The feature we think makes this tool stand out is the nudge tools that allow you to move the entire image up or down, left or right. This is handy when you need to center a graphic you just created. More information is available at www.eclipsit.com . A trial version of this tool can be downloaded from this site and the full version is US$40.