Making .ico Icons With Paint.NET
Giving your application an icon can be that finishing touch that says “application, I love you.” Unfortunately, the icon designer in Visual Studio 2005 isn’t a very friendly tool for creating nice looking icons. Wanting to make a cow icon for a quick 12/24 hour converter I wrote for my girlfriend, I went running to my favorite image editing program - Paint.NET.
Paint.NET it turns out doesn’t support saving images in the windows-standard .ico format! Luckily, someone was as unhappy with this as I was and created a filetype plugin for Paint.NET that grants the ability to work with and save images as icons. The download link is here. The plugin is awesome, it supports editing and saving images to be used as cursors also. And both formats, icons and cursors, can be saved with multiple image sizes in one file to support multiple icon and cursor sizes. While it is overkill for my application, this feature will save time in the future by allowing icons and cursors to be designed once (as a larger image) before being automatically scaled to each of the smaller sizes. The same feature addresses large icon and cursor sizes for users that require higher accessibility (another extremely important aspect of software development that is far too often ignored) making this plugin an all-in-one hit.
So while my girlfriend will never appreciate the depth and accessibility her little cow icon provides, it makes me smile knowing that in a pinch it could be blown up to all its 256×256 32bit glory :)
