Windows xp user icons

Internet Archive's 25th Anniversary Logo. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest.

Sign up Log in. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. Books Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip. Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3.

Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. Icon is composed of arbitrary number of images. This is because icon must be usable under wide variety of conditions.

Icon should look good on high-resolution LCD as well as on a ten years old monochromatic monitor. There are multiple images inside an icon, each optimized for best experience under specific circumstances.

Images usually have rectangular shape, icons on the other hand do not. When you put an icon on your desktop, it appears to have arbitrary shape and you can see background around that shape. Internally, the icon still has a rectangular shape, just like an image. But icons always support per-pixel transparency, which means that any pixel can be marked either transparent or opaque. When a pixel is transparent, background is displayed on that spot.

Transparent pixels are usually represented using chessboard pattern in icon editors. We have already mentioned in previous paragraph, that an icon is composed of several images. They have different sizes or resolutions and color depths. Windows defines standard sizes 16x16, 32x32, 48x48 and standard color depths 16 colors, colors, It is very important to create several image formats in an icon especially if you whish to redistribute it in order to be compatible with all screen configurations.

If an image format is missing, Windows displays the nearest existing image. It works but quality suffers. There is a standard file format for icons in Windows. Icon files always have. ICO extension. A file in this format holds all icon images. Microsoft also recommends how the images should be ordered inside an icon. Icons can also be embedded inside an application. EXE , application extension. DLL , or other executable file. This option is used quite often by application developers.

Icon editors are usually able to extract icons from applications. There is one more file format related to icons. It is called Icon Library. ICL and its sole purpose is to have multiple icons in one file. The value of this format is questionable, because anyone can get similar or better results by zipping icons or putting them into an ordinary file-system folder. There actually were no changes to the icon format when Windows XP was released.

Windows XP is just able to make use of a high quality image format in an icon. In this format, each pixel has one of 16M colors and one of levels of transparency. That means a pixel is no longer either opaque or transparent. Now it can be semi-transparent. The transparency level is called alpha channel. Thanks to alpha channel, icon can have shadows and smooth edges.

To practice your new knowledge, open an icon in RealWorld Icon Editor. Try making changes to it and watch Windows reacting to them. I love icons, they're beautiful, it's amazing that you can see them on different sises. Imagine if we get Animated Icons!

That would be amazing. Tutorials , App developer , Research , Online services , Web design. Find out how Vista icons differ from XP icons. What is a Windows XP Icon. Home Help Basics Icon. What is a Windows XP icon? August 8th This article answers basic questions about icons. What is an Icon? In this introduction to Windows XP icons, you will learn: What's the relation between an image and an icon. What's the structure of an icon.

How are icons distributed. What's the difference between Windows XP icons and older icons. What are the differences between an image and an icon?