16x16 Icons for vb6 Toolbox

[Davor Geci]

Hello,
for days I'm trying to find icons for toolbars 16x16 24bit.
There's tons of them but all are in 32bit. Using IconFX I reduce them to 24 bit, but the quality of these new icons when you reduce it, they are useless.
Does anyone might know for a place on the Web where you can find larger number of icons 16x16 24bit that we can use in our applications?

[Arnoutdv]

32 bit icons have an alpha channel, when converting to 24 bit you are loosing the alpha channel.
Switch to a more recent component which can deal with 32 bit icons/png images.

Have you looked at the Common Controls replacement by Krool?
http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.p...mmon-controls)

[gibra]

You can download 400 icons 16x16 256 colors (dll and icl formats also available)

http://www.vbcorner.net/download_icons.htm

[DataMiser]

Aren't the toolbar icons that ship with VB actually bmp files? Or perhaps it is both bmp and ico files, been a while since I looked at them.

[jmsrickland]

I think they are bitmaps in a single bitmap image

[dilettante]

There are quite a few BMPs, ICOs, CURs, and a few metafiles and videos. All of them are "individual" images. Sadly most are a little too shabby for most people, being barely changed from Win/Office 95 days. And quite a few that you might want aren't there.

It makes you wonder who isn't using a legal copy of VB6 and is dinking around with the pirated "Portable Edition."


But a "smart flattener" to convert things like PNG images to 256 colors with a mask color while tweaking shadows and translucency could be a useful utility. Color quantization can get messy though, and GDI+ does a terrible job by punting and creating a dithered image instead of dealing with it.

[jmsrickland]

I have a bitmap file which contains a strip of images that represents the toolbar for a Windows application. It's been on my system from day 1. I just don't know which app they belong to

[LeandroA]

hi, see this code, you can use .png in imageList in Common Controls 5.0 or 6.0.
http://leandroascierto.com/blog/png-en-un-imagelist/

[dilettante]

I have a bitmap file which contains a strip of images that represents the toolbar for a Windows application. It's been on my system from day 1. I just don't know which app they belong to

Sure these exist, and in many cases they can be a good idea. But I don't know of any that came as Common\Graphics resources in VS/VB 6. Perhaps there is something included in one of the Samples.

[gibra]

I have a bitmap file which contains a strip of images that represents the toolbar for a Windows application. It's been on my system from day 1. I just don't know which app they belong to

There are many tools for make Image Strip: 4 BPP (16 colors), 8 BPP (256 indexed colors), 24 BPP (RGB true color) and 32 BPP (RGB true color with alpha channel).
The best, by me, is:

Axialis IconWorkshop - Make icons for Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android, Windows Phone.
http://www.axialis.com/iconworkshop/

What is an Image Strip - Axialis Software
http://www.axialis.com/tutorials/image-strip.html

[fafalone]

It makes you wonder who isn't using a legal copy of VB6 and is dinking around with the pirated "Portable Edition."

A friend of a friend mentioned the only thing that's ever been available on pirate sites is the professional or enterprise editions, which come with all the (cruddy and unusable) images.
Ok ok it was me. But come on, I was a young teenager making AOL proggies at that time And just as MS intended, eventually stepped up to a legal version as an adult.

But anyway, the time investment you're looking at trying to get nice looking images compatible with built-in VB stuff is equal or less than the time investment it would take to use a more modern component. With krool's stuff, you can even just use the user-controls in-project and not worry about the ocx and distributing it.
(or if you're cool like me, you'd use API imagelists or IImageList2)

[Tech99]

But a "smart flattener" to convert things like PNG images to 256 colors with a mask color while tweaking shadows and translucency could be a useful utility.

It certainly/definitely would. Currently refreshing one 'old age' app gui and adding it few features, found out that flattened icon/bmp pictures is kind of pixel by pixel editing job.
Planned to do 'transparency' by 'going under the fence', just by setting BackColor of container to same as bmp/ico file backcolor has or vice versa.

[fafalone]

I don't think the way to modernize the UIs is to try to fake it like that when so many people have done such excellent work in showing how to use the real deal in VB. There's not a single control left between the native and common controls where it hasn't been shown how to use modern 32bpp alpha blended images. And it's almost always easier than fiddling trying to get things into VB's old image handlers.

[Tech99]

Very true, but this customer/project resources are limited, no chance to change controls.