Question on creating exe icons

[JohnRChick]

Hey. I have a question about the exe icon for my program. I made a couple and it appears that they have to be square for it to work. I noticed that the icons such as internet explorer and iTunes have icons that dont have a background to them like mine do. Is there anyway I can make it so that my icon doesn't have a square frame to it? I'm using photoshop too.

[-TPM-]

I've never tried using Photoshop to make an icon, but I'd imagine you'd just use a transparent background. Usually I just use the icon maker in VS. You could also try out MicroAngelo.

[JohnRChick]

hmm the thing with photoshop and transparent images is that you have to save it as a .png or .gif file for it to be transparent. VB2003 doesn't like using those files for the .exe icon -- or atleast I wasnt able to get it to work

[jre1229]

I d/l a program called "Easy Icon Maker" I took my .jpg and used the program to make the area around it transparent. It let me save it as a .ico. And it worked great. I am only using the 15 day eval program, which was plenty of time to do what I needed

[jmcilhinney]

There are heaps of utilities around to create icons. Microangelo and Icon Workshop are two very good ones that I've used (or at least tried to ) in the past. They are both relatively advanced and are probably overkill for many, but I've heard of many other similar utilities as well.

[Kasracer]

Make a PNG with transparency. Once you get it as you like, use a program to convert it to a 32-bit icon with alpha transparency.

I use GConvert to do the conversion.