ZdNetItalia : IconForge (32-bit)

Edit icons, cursors, .ani files, & more
Create and modify icons or cursors for your Windows desktop with IconForge, one of the best icon editors we've seen. Besides working with every standard icon size and color depth, you can use the program for other graphics projects, such as producing tiles for wallpaper backgrounds. The program contains a full set of painting tools, including polygon, brush, line, multilevel zoom, circles, rectangles, area selector, flood fill, erasers, color replacement fill, nudge, and flip. Magnify sliders provide easy zooming, and the text tool makes it easy to put letters into icons. You'll also find special effects filters not usually found in icon editors, such as blur, whirlpool, make tile pattern, and color reduction. Built-in library functions let you assemble and edit collections of icons in standard .icl icon library format, which makes it easy to organize your icon images and save disk space. IconForge can produce and edit animated icons and cursors as well. You can easily set delay times for the frames, preview the animation, set frame-by-frame hot spots, duplicate frames, and add/delete frames. Individual frames can be edited in a separate window, complete with its own zoom controls. An especially nice touch: IconForge can automatically generate common animation effects from your image, including Rotate, Swirl, Fade, Dissolve, and Wipes. Animated icons and cursors can be exported to .avi or animated .gif formats, which lets you use the same image in your programs on your Web page or other presentation. The program can also extract icons from .exe, .dll, .ani, or .cur files, as well as OS/2 icon files and most common image types. Icons can be written back into program files, such as many types of .exe, .dll, .ocx, and .vbx files. Windows .drv and .cpl files can be edited, too. You can clip a region from imported images or scale them to fit the standard icon/cursor sizes. Edited icons can be saved in icon/cursor formats or exported to popular bitmap image formats such as .bmp, .gif, .jpg, .pcx, or .tif. Because IconForge can display several editing sessions simultaneously, it's easy to cut and paste material between cursors, icons, and animations. Plus, IconForge's friendly interface features enhanced Open and Save boxes, built-in previews, toolbars, and tooltips. This trial edition is fully functional for 30 days. A 16-bit version is also available. Reviewed on Jul 7 1998.