More button bar icon file formats

[Thany]

Suggestion: Allow PNG and GIF (and possibly others) to choose for an icon for a button in the button bar. Currently it only accepts EXE, DLL and ICO.

[MaxX]

2Thany
do you really think it is possible?

[Horst.Epp]

Suggestion: Allow PNG and GIF (and possibly others) to choose for an icon for a button in the button bar. Currently it only accepts EXE, DLL and ICO.

Thats more than enough.
There are many free programs which can make ICO files form any source.
Why should TC have more than the traditional formats ?
There are many more importand issues to be solved by Christian.

[Thany]

@MaxX
Yes I do. An icon is nothing but a picture and a PNG is a picture.

@Horst.Epp
Why: because PNG's are a million times easier to create, and might already exist. Converting to ICO (being the only choice for singular icons!) is an unneccesary extra step. Although most TC users might know how to, many others might not know how to do this. Plus, there's no reason for it to be neccesary.

Also, you say there are more important issues to address. That's fine. But that's no reason to completely disregard this one. Low priority is fine, too.

[Balderstrom]

Most ICOns these days are just PNG's with an ICL or ICO header (they used to primarily be bitmaps).

I would wonder if any code would even have to change to enable PNG's without the ICO header.

[Gral]

As now TC doesn't read PNG image EVEN with ico header.

[Thany]

Okay now *that* I would call a bug. Because afaik, PNG format is part of the standard (if you could call it that) of the ICO file format, and has been for several years. PNG-ICO was introduced as of... Windows XP, right? That's quite a while back

In any case, reading PNG files is trivial these days. There are about 60 billion libraries for it, no doubt there's one that TC can use.

[MVV]

It is not a bug because no one promised that it will work. PNG and ICO have different headers.

It takes a second to convert PNG to ICO. I tried Imagine and IcoFX, and got almost the same result.

Anyway, there's no need to have large icons so you need to prepare them anyway, you can't just take 1280x1024 PNG and use it as icon.

[Thany]

It is not a bug because no one promised that it will work. PNG and ICO have different headers.

The definition of a bug is not entirely clear, but I'm pretty that's not it.

It takes a second to convert PNG to ICO. I tried Imagine and IcoFX, and got almost the same result.

Even if it does take a second (it doesn't), the simple fact is that it's an extra step that needs to be taken for something so mundane as an icon. Any extra step that can be done automatically is one step too much. Simple as that.

Anyway, there's no need to have large icons so you need to prepare them anyway, you can't just take 1280x1024 PNG and use it as icon.

I never said I would do that. But it IS possible, it just won't look good. Any icon different from the little picture that is drawn on the buttons, will need to be scaled up or down. It doesn't matter if it needs to be scaled 1.2x or 20x. It will look horrible in either case. Using either ICO or PNG, you need to make it's the right size, and if not, accept scaling that might look bad.

Anyway.
Come on man.
The most widely-supported graphics format in the world shouldn't need so much discussion to be implemented.


/edit
KeePass also supports importing custom icons, for password entries. And guess which file format is supported (among many others).

[Gral]

With Greenfish Icon Editor Pro it took me exactly 10 seconds convert PNG to MULTIFORMAT ICON (10 images): "Icon" - "Create Windows icon from image" (1 second per image). But create icon with 30 images takes 10 second too!
Get it and try - it's open source.

[Thany]

Dude, that's not the point. It doesn't matter how quickly you can convert one format to another. It's a piece of software that needs to be installed (on every machine I use TC on, just in case) which neither we nor TC has control over, and probably has some kind of learning curve.

Moreover, it's a workaround for an issue that you simply don't want to see being fixed in TC itself, the reason for which has yet to be revealed.

[Horst.Epp]

...
It's a piece of software that needs to be installed (on every machine I use TC on, just in case) which neither we nor TC has control over, and probably has some kind of learning curve.

Moreover, it's a workaround for an issue that you simply don't want to see being fixed in TC itself, the reason for which has yet to be revealed.

There is nothing to be installed on every machine, just on one.
Every user I know copies their TC installation including the Icon set
from one master to every other machine he uses. Thats specialy true if you dont have full control on some of them.

[Thany]

Again, that's not the point. This is the same as claiming that FTP doesn't need to be in TC, because there are other programs that can do FTP.

[Balderstrom]

@Thany, I agree with you... but the problem is there is a workaround. I doubt I've seen any feature request implemented that has an existing workaround.

These days, my TC is little more than an application launcher (*), that passes selected files to AHK scripts. If Windows File Explorer could do subdir branch view, I could probably get rid of TC and use Explorer with a couple addons: QTTabBAR, StexBAR.

TC has seriously fallen behind when it comes to customization of the interface/gui. And Explorer's handling of Multimedia: Pictures (Thumbs), videos, etc trounces all over TC - which is more akin to Win2K's explorer.

(*) MRT is still top-notch (mostly), File Compare could probably be replaced with one of the open-source tools.

Maybe when TC gets to Version 12, one or two of the feature-requests from the last 6 years will get implemented.

[Sob]

As now TC doesn't read PNG image EVEN with ico header.

Are you sure? I admit that this "png in ico" is new information for me, so I checked the disk for icons that might be pngs and found few favicons in profile directory of Firefox. Their inner structure is clearly PNG, except for 22 extra bytes at the beginning, which I assume is ICO header. And these icons work just fine in TC, the image is shown in the list and they can be used for toolbar buttons.