256x256 px icons

[Warren Young]

On 7/27/2011 1:41 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>
> You say you already have created such icon files before.  Would you
> have fun to create a new "official" cygwin.ico?

Here you go:

	http://etr-usa.com/cygwin/mintty-icon/combined.ico

That file contains a 256 px 32 bpp (RGBA) Vista (PNG) icon plus standard 
BMP icons in 48 px 32 bpp, 32 px 8 bpp, 24 px 8 bpp, and 16 px 8 bpp 
sizes and depths.  If you look at the directory view, you can see the 
source files that went into this.

I used the icobundl tool from

	http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/product/ICOBundle

to assemble combined.ico.

I'm willing to keep playing with this a bit more.  Points of discussion:

- Do we need more sizes?  I've seen reference to odd sizes like 64x64 
and 96x96, but surely we can trust Vista+ to scale the 256x256 to these 
sizes without needing hand-tweaked versions?

- Something I read talked about the 16x16 being 4bpp, but I can't see a 
need for that since the the old Windows 95 Plus Pack days.  Everything 
from Win98 up should actually be fine with 16bpp and up.  The only 
reason I used 8bpp for the smallest ones is that's a big enough box of 
crayons.

- There are two source icon files.  full-size.png is pretty much what I 
linked to yesterday as mintty-icon-glowy-wedge.png, with some minor 
tweaks.  high-contrast is a variant of this with higher contrast, needed 
when scaling to smaller sizes.

- The 16, 24 and 32 px versions are pretty heavily hand-tweaked after 
they were scaled down from high-contrast.png.  Acceptable, or more 
tweaking needed?

> The only problem to look out for is licensing.  If you use foreign
> art, you have to make sure that the icon is published under a free
> license.

There are two source pieces, the fattbuttlary Cygwin icon and the KDE 
Konsole icon.  I assembled and massaged them on work time.  Red Hat has 
a copyright assignment on file for me, from way back.