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IconEdit(VERSION 1.00) Copyright (c) 1997 Ziff-Davis Publishing
Company
By Michael J. Mefford
First Published in PC Magazine June 24, 1997
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About  IconEdit...

IconEdit lets you create and modify 32x32 16-color icons the 
type that are used on the Windows 95 desktop. Though Windows 
uses icons of other sizes, it will rescale icons as needed. 
So if you change the icon of a Desktop shortcut and then place 
it in your Start menu, you will see a scaled down, 16x16 version 
of it in the Start menu.

If you change the icon for a Windows program, the new icon will 
only be visible within Explorer (i.e., on your desktop or in 
your Start menu). When you actually run the program, the 
original icon compiled with the program will appear on the 
taskbar or in the tray. (DOS programs will use the new icon 
because there is no icon embedded within the executable.) 
The only way to get a Windows program to use the new icon 
is to recompile it with the new icon, or use a resource editor 
such as Borland's Resource Workshop.

USAGE:

To install IconEdit, copy the program files ICONEDIT.EXE and 
ICONEDIT.HLP to a subdirectory on your hard disk, and create 
an icon for IconEdit in your shell. When you first launch 
IconEdit, you'll see a toolbar on the left with an empty 
editing window to the right. Select File|New to create a new 
icon, or File|Open to load an existing icon for editing. 
You can save an icon you've edited by clicking the diskette 
button at the top of the tool bar or by selecting Save in 
the File menu. If you you obtained the icon from within 
an .EXE or .DLL file, it will be saved as an icon file 
(.ICO) and not back into the file from which you 
obtained it.

The editing window displays two representations of the 
icon: a large zoomed-in square that's eight times bigger than 
the actual icon, and a small square to its right that's 
actual size. The zoomed square is where the editing takes 
place. New icons appear as solid green with a black square 
surrounding each pixel representation. The pixels are, of 
course, eight times actual size like the square itself for 
ease of editing. The green color is not actually the starting
color of the icon, but instead represents the transparent 
"color".

An icon is a bitmap with two additional special properties. 
Pixels of an icon can not only be a specific color; they also 
can be transparent or screen reverse color. A transparent 
pixel lets the background color of whatever the icon is over 
show through. A reverse screen color pixel takes on the 
opposite color of whatever the icon is over. Both IconEdit's 
large editing square and the actual icon sized square are 
ordinary bitmaps without transparent or reverse screen color 
capabilities. 

The display of transparency and reverse screen color during 
editing would cause a substantial performance hit, so 
IconEdit instead substitutes fixed colors for transparent and 
reverse screen colors. IconEdit uses dark green in the 
editing bitmap to represent transparency, and red to 
represent reverse color. You can see transparent and reverse 
color by selecting Test Icon from the Icon menu. In the test 
icon window that appears you'll see the icon as a true icon, 
and you can select different window colors to see how the 
icon looks against different color backgrounds.

The two large color squares right under the tools are the 
current colors for the left and right mouse buttons, 
respectively. When you launch IconEdit, the left mouse button 
color is black and the right mouse button color is white. 
If you click with the left mouse button on a pixel with the 
pencil tool, for example, the pixel will turn black. Click 
with the right mouse button and the pixel will turn white. 
To change the default colors, click on one of the 16 colors 
in the palette just below the current color boxes with either 
the left or right mouse button. Clicking on a palette color 
with the left button will change the left button color and a 
right button click will change the right button color.

The tool bar consists of eight tools: capture, pencil, fill, 
line, hollow and filled rectangle, and hollow and filled 
ellipse. These will be familiar to anyone who has used a 
paint program. The default tool when you start editing an 
icon is the pencil, since this is the tool you'll probably 
use the most. The pencil let's you color one pixel at a time. 
To change a pixel simply place the point of the pencil cursor
over a pixel in the big editing square and click. You can 
pencil-draw several pixels at once by dragging the pencil 
over an area.

Support for IconEdit:
Support for the free utilities offered by PC Magazine can 
be obtained electronically in the discussion area of 
PC Magazine's Web site. Go to the 
URL http://www.pcmag.com/discuss.htm/ and select the 
Utilities area. You can also access the Utilities discussion 
area from the utility's download page. The authors of current 
utilities generally monitor the discussion area every day. 
You may find an answer to your question simply by reading
the messages previously posted. If the author is not 
available and you have a question that the sysops can't 
answer, the editor of the Utilities column, who also checks 
the area each day, will contact the author for you.

Rick Knoblaugh is a systems programmer and a frequent 
contributor to PC Magazine. 
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