ArtIcons provides great opportunities for working with Windows XP and Windows Vista icons. You will be able to handle Vista Icons with ease. In order to make Vista icons compatible with Windows XP you can save them without any compression.

Vista Icons introduce a new style of iconography that brings a higher level of detail and sophistication to Windows imagery. First, the style of Windows Aero-style icons is more realistic than illustrative, but not quite photorealistic. The icons are symbolic images - they should look better than photorealistic. Second, icons have a maximum size of 256 x 256, making them suitable for high-DPI displays. These high-resolution icons allow for high visual quality in list views with large icons. Finally, wherever practical, fixed document icons are replaced by thumbnails of the content, making documents easier to identify and find. Thus, ArtIcons is a beeline to refining the visuals of your program and making it more communicative for users.

A picture of a maximum size of 256 x 256 to be used as an icon, in principle, is supported by XP, yet such an icon occupies 400Kb of disk space, which is far more than standard 25Kb of an XP icon. Aha-Soft has again found a way to cast off these shackles: ArtIcons uses advanced PNG compression to save images without losses and supports semitransparent images with 8bit alpha channel. That technology reduces the size of an icon only, leaving the quality invariable.

ArtIcons will help you to obtain the modern Windows Vista look. All you need is just to redesign your program's most prominent icons to use the Aero-style. From this time onwards Vista Icons crafted by ArtIcons will strongly impact users' overall impression of your programs' visual design. ArtIcons will improve the usability of your software by making programs, objects, and actions easier to identify and find.

Features :

Create and edit icons in either standard or custom sizes, in color depths up to 16 million colors
Create and edit icons for Windows XP in 32-bit color depth with 8-bit alpha channel
Create and store images containing several layers
Paint images with gradient and chess fill
Modify images with drop shadow, opacity, smooth, negative, grayscale, colorize, hue/saturation, rotate, roll and mirror effects
Replace image colors
Create and manage icon libraries for better and more efficient storage
Paste images in various graphic formats (ICO, ICPR, BMP, JPEG and PNG) directly into icons
Export icon images to ICO, ICPR, BMP, JPEG and PNG files
Extract icons from Windows executables, libraries and animated cursor files
Extract icons from all files in selected folders and subfolders and save them as icon libraries
Convert Mac icons to Windows format
Modify icons inside executables and other program files
Sort images inside icons and icons inside libraries
Customize Windows Desktop and folder icons
Drag and drop files from file shells
Drag and drop icons between different libraries
Use English, Spanish, German and other interfaces

Platform: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista

System Requirements: 64MB RAM, Pentium-333 MHz, 4MB Hard Disk, True Color video mode