Icons, logos, Tango, consistency, the user experience, and our project looks like a 2D champaign flute

[Reece Dunn]

2009/4/18 Ben Klein <shacklein at gmail.com>:
> 2009/4/18 Reece Dunn <msclrhd at googlemail.com>:
>> Yeah, AlphaBlending is not supported (hence the diagonals look jagged)
>> -- theming is also affected.
>>
>> NOTE: I have seen this happen on other Windows apps running on
>> Windows. You need to have the image support an alpha channel - which
>> I'm not sure icons do. I'm not sure of the API calls that are
>> required, though, so it may require some changes to the static control
>> support to render the bitmaps using alpha (in addition to keyed)
>> transparency.
>
> I believe *some* versions of the ANI/CUR/ICO formats support alpha
> channels, but I couldn't tell you where to look. Out of interest, what
> format do Vista/Windows 7 icons use, and do they support alpha
> channels? (I seem to recall some transparency effects on Vista icons,
> could be wrong).

From: http://www.telegraphics.com.au/svn/icoformat/trunk/dist/README.html
    "The ICO format has an inherent 1 bit transparency mask (0 =
opaque, 1 = transparent), called the AND bitmap."
which is the older format icon. and:
    "In PNG (Vista) format icons, the alpha channel is simply stored
as part of the PNG. There is no separate mask."

http://www.rw-designer.com/windows-xp-icon
http://www.rw-designer.com/vista-icon

According to these, you can store the images as PNG in Vista instead
of BMP+mask, allowing you to preserve the alpha channel. Vista also
supports 256x256 icon images (according to the information above).

http://www.axialis.com/tutorials/tutorial-vistaicons.html
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511280.aspx

Have some more information. From the MDSN article, it appears that
toolbar images (and other images stored in image lists?) only support
a 1-bit alpha mask.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc546571.aspx

Has information on the new format. Note that PNG can be used in place
of DIB image data.

It shouldn't be too difficult to use something like libpng to handle
the images and produce a bitmap from it. This would need support on
the resource compiler side as well.

IIRC, Wine *does* support AlphaBlending, but it is very slow.

- Reece