I want to use Vista Large Icon feature in my Delphi 2009 application, but I can only embed the normal 32x32 icon in my application. How can I make application have many sizes of Icons?
Thanks
Go download IcoFX. It's free and handles multiple sizes/colour depths AND proper alpha blending. Use that to create your ICO file, then add the ICO to your project. Can't give you a blow-by-blow of the steps for loading the ICO in 2009, because I'm stuck using Delphi 7...
If it's any consolation, Visual Studio has taken eons to get anywhere near decent icon editing too.
Hey, who remembers the Borland Resource Workshop ?
I would use a icon editor such as AWIcons which allows you to create an icon that contains many different formats. Windows will then decide, based on the current view and color depth, which icon to use.
Once you have created your SINGLE icon with many different embedded formats, just link it like you would your 32x32 icon. It might look funny in the IDE, but when you run the program it will look correctly.
Get a decent stock of icons, or make your own. I use an the icon library from Icon Experience - your pay, but all icon sizes 16x16 up to 256 x 256 are provided in ICO and PNG formats. I then use Icon Sushi to work with my own icons. Delphi 7 and 2009 both have limitations working with large icons, so I've moved to using PNG icons using the PNG components library. This gives you a TPNGImageList that just works where the Vista cacheing and other problems make using TImageList only really good for 16x16 and 32x32 sizes. I've also ported PNGComponents to D2009 where it works fine.
Brian
I can only embed the normal 32x32 icon
in my application
From my experience, Delphi 2009 lets you use any icon. I've used extra large Vista icons too, and it worked.
Solution:
There is a BETTER AND EASY way to add high resolution icons in your Delphi 7 application.
It doesn't involve hacking your exe file:
http://thesunstroke.blogspot.com/2010/10/how-to-add-high-resolution-icons-to.html
If your are wanting some free software to create icons then you can probably use GIMP. My very first video tutorial was using GIMP to create icons - it's available here.
Configure the project to use the Microsoft resource compiler.
Once you are done building your project, add all the needed icons your project needs at the post-build step with the resource editor as described here: http://www.heaventools.com/rtconsole-sample-script-guide.htm
Related
We have a legacy application developed in Delphi 6 (yes, I know this is an ancient IDE now), which we are trying to update to look more modern. We have added in a Manifest and now have it using version 6 Windows controls and taking on the Windows Visual Theme (all good).
However, when trying to replace the old 4 bit toolbar and menu icons with True Colour with Alpha Channel (32 bit) transparency we have hit a problem. It appears that Delphi 6 only supports transparency based on the bottom left pixel colour (http://delphi.about.com/od/delphitips2007/qt/timage_transp.htm) and does not support more modern alpha-blended transparency. This is causing an issue, as all the graphics we have had created are in this format and do not look good when added to the toolbar due to anti-aliasing creating a fringe effect (in the background colour on which they were created, transparent becomes white in this case) around them.
I have been scouring the internet for hours trying to confirm whether or not Delphi 6 does or can be made to support these image formats, but, as Delphi 6 is so old now, I am only finding references to Delphi 7 and above.
Can anyone confirm whether what we are trying to achieve is possible or if there are any workarounds for this apparent limitation? Please note that upgrading to a newer version of Delphi is not an option for this particular project due to limited budget and time.
What is the right way to define a win7-compatible icon set in a Delphi application ? ( variable size on desktop )
I have designed a 256*256 icon then made the 16*16, 24*24, 48*48 variants. ( in Microsoft UX guide, they seem to say that these sizes should be included for a correct display on the desktop).
I've put all icons variations in a multiple layer document in Gimp and exported the whole stuff as an ico. Then I've put it as the application icon in the project options, following the straight way to assign an icon to an application.
FInally I've put a shorcut on Win desktop (win7) but when making "Ctrl+Wheel" (resizing of desktop icons, if you don't know it yet...) on the desktop (Win 7), correct icon is not displayed, after 48*48 it keeps the same size ( I suspect that only the 48*48 version is used).
The 256px sized icon should be a compressed PNG icon. I suspect that the resource compiler shipped with Delphi 2007 won't like that format so you'll need to use the MS resource compiler, rc. The icon should be named MAINICON. That said, I suspect that a 256px bitmap will work, it will just be exceedingly large.
What's more, IIRC, the Delphi IDE doesn't like 256px PNG icons so it's no good adding the icon to the project through the IDE. You need to build the .res file yourself and link it with a {$R ...} directive.
Finally, its possible that your .ico file may not be correct. The 256px image is actually stored with width and height equal to 0 because that field is byte sized and 0 was formerly invalid. Perhaps this is what the IDE gags on. Check the .ico file out in a different tool, e.g. IcoFX.
There may be other problems—these are just the ones I can recall encountering over the years. If I had to guess as to which issue was biting you, I'd say it was the inability of the IDE to handle 256px icons.
I believe that the IDE has got progressively better in this area in more recent versions, but even in D2010 which I currently use, it's not perfect.
Delphi 2010's TSpeedButtons did not seem to really support PNG transparency properly, because the Glyph property uses a TBitmap internally, and TBitmap is for bitmaps, and doesn't support PNG transparency properly, and TSpeedButton.Glyph can't support transparency then.. update: But the actual problem was that I had some external stuff (Developer Express components) that was rendering delphi's PNG support non-functional, TImage on the other hand, while it still TPicture, and can support PNG, was also affected by this Developer express bug.
A question was already asked about here, and the answer shows how to use pre-blending so that transparency won't turn into black pixels. I want to know if there is another button control that will use alpha-blended PNGs loaded at designtime, and which does not convert the PNG resources into BMP format discarding the alpha channel and, causing the black border shown here.
In short, this control would not use TBitmap, and would not use the color key transparency feature that is all TBitmap has.
To repeat, I am not asking how to solve the black-around-the-outside issue while still using the out-of-date TBitmap/TSpeedButton based VCL functionality, because it lacks modern PNG transparency functionality, I am asking about replacing it with something else that "just works".
As a secondary drawback, converting a small .png file into a .DFM bitmap resource is essentially wasting space and making my form .DFM content too large. Native .png file format storage within the .dfm should make the resulting forms smaller.
Update: PngComponents look like they should work, but I got an Invalid Graphic format error when I try to load a png into the Png speedbutton. Note that the Png image list component has no such problems. It seems that cxLibrary (a developer express package) is breaking things. Once I removed all developer express stuff, this problem goes away. So although I have selected Pngcomponents as the answer, if you have devex stuff installed, use their buttons instead, and not pngcomponents.
You may have a look at PngComponents. It has a TPngSpeedbutton and some other controls working directly with PngImages.
You could also look into the TMS Software Component called TAdvGlowButton as this supports PNG images with alpha transparency.
Link to site...
It turns out that cxButton that comes in the Developer Express VCL component pack also supports PNG buttons.
I've been working with a program someone else has made and I wanted to change the icon.
The icon I have is 256x256. I used http://converticon.com/ to create the icon (from a bmp I think). I used the icon in Inno Setup to create an installer and it worked fine
So I go to Options -> Application and attempt to load it. However, Delphi 2007 gives me an error 'The parameter is incorrect.' with this info: http://i.stack.imgur.com/vRCgs.png
When I do the same thing in Delphi XE, it works and loads the icon and changes it on compile. I can't use XE right now because the program uses a math parser that has a problem with unicode (thats something to fix for later haha)
So, what I did was open the project in XE, change the icon, save it, delete the dproj and open it in 2007. This works, compiles and displays the correct icon, but when I go to the project options, it gives me the same 'The parameter is incorrect' error.
The workaround isn't a big deal, but I shouldn't need to do it. Does anyone know why I can't change the icon in Delphi 2007?
Edit: I just used that same converticon site to convert the 256x256 icon to 192x192 and smaller and now it works perfectly. Thanks for the answers
The "icon" file is actually a collection of images, at different resolution and using different encodings. When I'm creating my icons I'm making sure they don't actually contain the 256x256 PNG-encoded version because development tools built before Windows Vista don't understand that. And that includes your Delphi 2007 and my Delphi 7. I also remove the alpha-encoded 256x256 icon because it simply makes the file needlessly large.
You've got two fixes possible:
Find an ICO editor and remove all of the larger formats until your Delphi accepts the icon. I personally never seen the 256x256 used in the real world, they'd take up huge amounts of space on user's Desktop or in Windows Explorer.
Use a dummy icon and replace the icon resource in the generated exe after Delphi is done with it. This way you can keep all of the larger image formats, including the 256x256 PNG image.
Edit to correct an error
If possible, always include the 256x256 image, Windows scales that down for everything above 64x64.
I always assumed Windows Explorer would show an image that's based on the closest matching image size available in the ICO. That is, if a 128x128 image is necessary, Windows would use the 128x128 image if available, or scale down the 256x256 image if that's available, or scale up the 96x96 image. Apparently that's not so. I've just made a test icon consisting of several image formats, including 32, 48, 72, 96, 128 and 256 consisting of simple blobs of color (using the flood-fill tool). In Windows Explorer I cycled throw the various Display Modes, and it became apparent that starting with "Large Icon" (and that's not very large) Windows will scale down the 256x256 icon, and if that's not available, use the 48x48 icon, unscaled! The result is truly ugly and unexpected. The 72x72, 96x96 and 128x128 icons were simply ignored.
Thank you David for pointing this out.
Older versions of Delphi don't support 256px Vista icons. I believe that 2010 does not support them so I guess the limitation was fixed in XE.
When working with an older Delphi you'll need to keep the 256px icon out of the IDE. You can still build an executable with a 256px icon from the command line compiler - I used to do just this before upgrading from Delphi 6. But to do this requires the use of a competent resource compiler, for example the Microsoft one.
2007 will let you select icons with a 256 pixel image. Here is what I tried:
The default icon for Delphi XE contains several image sizes, including a 256 pixel image.
If I extract the icon from a Delphi XE application using a resource editor, I can add that icon to a Delphi 2007 application using the IDE's project options. I don't get an error, and the icon images show as expected in Windows Vista/7 using Explorer at different sizes.
If I take the same icon that worked in Delphi 2007 and remove all of the image sizes other than the 256 pixel image using IcoFX, and try to select it again, then I get an error.
Try creating a .ico that includes other image sizes and see if that works for you.
Has anyone improved the ResXexplor demo that ships with Delphi 2010?
The demo does not load 256x256 icons. These icons appear as 0x0 0 colors.
The demo does not load Cursor Groups.
The bitdepths are not shown correctly except for for 16 color icons. All other bitdepths are shown as:
48x48 0 colors
32x32 0 colors...
Any suggestions on how to fix these problems?
Not really an answer to your question, but you might want to check out XN Resource Editor. It's a free resource editor made in Delphi and comes with source code.
The demo does not load 256x256 icons.
TIcon class in delphi does not support png-icons.
What about Res Editor by Melander?
http://melander.dk/reseditor/