Most of my icon experience revolves around two applications called AX Icons and Microangelo. I highly recommend these applications for anyone who wishes to customize the icons in their computer. Another excellent application for viewing gif and over 200 file types is Quick View Plus 4.0

Monitor Settings:

  In order to properly view icons that are above the 16 color range your monitors color range must be set properly. Windows 95's default setting is 256 colors. This setting is only good for 16 color icons, others will look pale or washed out, like the icon above. To change the settings follow these instructions:

1. Right click the screen on your desktop, or go to the Control Panel and select settings.

2. Form the menu select the settings tab.

3. From the drop down menu in the Color Palette select 16 or 24 bit color. You will now have to restart your computer.

Note: For those of you that have MS Plus, AX-Icons, or Microangelo there is another step to follow. From the appropriate menu select " View icons using all possible colors". This will further enhance the icon colors.

To Change an Icon on the Desktop:

   This lesson is for those that have not taken my sage advice by downloading the above applications. Without these apps you are limited to changing the icons on your desktop. You will not be able to directly view the icon libraries you receive from me, but never fear, they can be utilized!

1. Create a folder to store the icon libraries, name it whatever.

2. Right click the icon you want to change.

3. Select properties from the drop down menu.

4. Select "Change Icon".

5. Select "browse", go to the folder you created and open it. Now you can view the contents of the icon library.

6. Double click left click the icon you want, select "Apply" from the properties menu and you are done!

 

Converting Mac Icons

   Fortunately there is an application that will convert a Macintosh icon outright. However many times the proper colors will not come through. If you want to be accurate the following method is fool proof.

1. The only way to accomplish this is to first have a friend with a Mac!

2. Next they must make a screen capture of the icon or icon library and save it as a .gif. Right click the .gif and select Quick View, ( assuming you have it, if you don't then you must get it ).

3. Open the icon editor and click on the little camera, choose the size and color range from the drop down menu, this will make a screen capture of each icon that can then be saved as a .ico ( icon resource ).

4. Mac icons contain colors not found in the PC color palette. For accurate translations of Mac icons to PC icons you must download my new Mac color palette. After downloading place it in the Microangelo folder and in the Studio select edit, open color palette.

Converting a Gif

1. Launch both applications (Micro. and QuickView)

2. Right click the .gif, select Quick View, and the icon is displayed.

3. Select all and copy it to the clipboard.

4. Go to Microangelo and hit the paste button and the icon is displayed .

5. Hit the Save as and give it a name The icon is saved to a misc. folder When you have enough of them create a new library.

6. You can also view a .gif directly from Microangelo but it takes longer to process the icon.

 

Basic Description

   Windows icons come in many different sizes and color depths. Under Windows 3.1, icons were 16 colors and 32x32 pixels in size. Prompted by , higher screen resolutions, and greater color depth, Windows 95 users began using a wider variety of icons to populate their desktop. By utilizing the full potential of the icon structure, a wide variety of colors and sizes can be used when displaying an icon. Icon resources such as a Windows Icon File (.ico) now often contain multiple icon sizes with varying depths of color, allowing the icon resource to be utilized more effectively across systems using different display settings. Windows can now select the icon which most closely fits the display parameters of your environment.

A typical Windows 95 icon has the following structure:

Icon Size	Color Range
16x16	16 & 256 colors
32x32	16 & 256 colors
48x48	16 & 256 colors

   Actually you are getting 6 icons in one because each is displayed in 16 and 256 or more colors. Remember that with MS Plus or other icon applications you can select "View icons in all possible colors". This will allow you to view an icon in up to 16 bit color. Remember to set your monitor to 16 bit color because Windows 95 is set to the default 256 colors. At this color level icons will be displayed at only 16 colors.

Icon Resources

   An icon resource is a term applied to files which contain icons. File formats used to store these icons include Windows Icon Files (.ico), Dynamic Linked Libraries (.dll), Icon Libraries (.icl), and Executables (.exe) to name just a few. 

   The appropriate icon is determined by the current system settings. If Windows is operating at a high resolution and using a color depth of 16 Million colors, then it will attempt to select the icon which most closely matches those parameters.

Icon Management

Store icons in Icon Libraries or Dynamic Linked Libraries.

   Dealing with thousands of icons can become quite a chore, so it's a good idea to develop an organization strategy for  your collection.

   Storing individual icons can be an extremely storage-intensive task if not done properly. The main problem is that Windows 95 still stores files very inefficiently. When you partition your disk drive (whether it's floppy or hard), the operating system looks at the size of the partition and then breaks the disk into clusters. For example:

Partition Size	Cluster Size
256-511MB	8192 bytes
512MB-1GB	16,384 bytes
1GB-2GB	32,768 bytes

     A file may span several clusters, but two files may not share one cluster. This means that on a 1.2 Gig drive, a 766 byte icon file will still occupy 32K, and a whole bunch of icons means a whole bunch of wasted space. Compression programs generally get rid of that dead space, but there are other solutions as well.

I would suggest creating well organized icon libraries (using .icl or .dll files). The icons which I distribute are stored in icon library files because they will hold a large number of icons but the computer only reads each library as one file. In addition to this when the proper icon software is installed the libraries will use the first icon in the set as it's representative icon. Instead of seeing default icons in Windows Explorer the first icon will be viewed. This is very helpful in larger collections when trying to locate a particular library. Most icon programs can extract, add, or modify the icons in these libraries with very little effort.

Organize icons in a logical and well distributed manner.

   Finding the perfect icon in a disorganized collection, or even in a well organized but poorly categorized collection, can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. That's why it's important to organize your icons in a meaningful way. Understanding how you search for images is particularly important in determining how to organize your collection. If I've got 40,000 icons and I need to find a picture of a needle, it doesn't do much good for me to organize my icons by author. I try to organize my files by class or object type because that's how I generally search for things. I've got separate folders for computer icons, cartoon icons, animal icons, nature icons, and dozens of others. In the lager categories I create sub folders. For example the computer folder has a printer, folder, hard drive, and so on. Special and unique collections I always keep together by author. 

   With the proper icon software, icons can be copied from the libraries and saved as a single icon. This is helpful when extracting icons to convert to GIF's for web pages.

 

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