Introduction

IconDeveloper is a program that makes it easy to create Windows icons. Most icon "editors" come with their own graphics editor. IconDeveloper doesn't. Instead, it assumes that most people who want to create icons are either going to create them using an existing graphics package like Photoshop, MS Paint, Corel Draw. Or they take existing images (.BMP, .PNG, .JPG, etc.) and turn those into icons.

So instead of putting effort into a bitmap editor, IconDeveloper focuses itself on making it really really easy to turn existing images into Windows icons and allowing for common modifications of those icons (resizing, color changing, etc.). The result is a program that makes icons extremely fast, extremely well, and extremely easily.

IconDeveloper in Action

When you open up IconDeveloper you can create a new icon from the file->new menu.

From Explorer, you can right click on an image and choose to create an icon with it with IconDeveloper.

When you bring in that image, IconDeveloper will automatically create the most commonly used icon formats for you.

IconDeveloper can also do batch processing. Create a whole library of icons from a set of graphics images in a folder. Or change all the colors of a folder of icons or images at once (this is great for skin authors).

IconDeveloper can make use of your IconPackager library of icons.

IconDeveloper can also edit icons that are inside of a .ICL file.

It can also change the colors of icons in that ICL file. Look closely at this screenshot. In this example, only the blue folder is being changed. The rest of the folder items, which are a different color, go untouched. IconDeveloper supports intelligent color changing.

IconDeveloper also makes it easy to turn images found on the net. Go to a search engine such as Google to find images you might want. In this example we're looking for a Santa PNG file.  The reason .PNG files are used is that they support alpha blending (alpha blending is where images can have various levels of transparency).

Here a Santa .PNG file is found and is copied into the clipboard.

IconDeveloper can create an icon right from the clipboard

The pasted image is now turned into an icon of various sizes.

The various versions

IconDeveloper is available as a free download. The free version allows for the creation of standard Windows icons, Windows XP icons, and shell integration. For 14 days, you can also try it out with all supported icon sizes (tops out at 32x32 after that initial period).

An enhanced version is also available for $19.95 which adds additional features such as colorizing, batch processing (turn a bunch of images into an icon at once or change the color of an entire library of icons to a different color -- ex: blue foldered icons to green foldered icons) plus large icon support (create 48x48 icons or 128x128 icons or any other size you want).

The enhanced version is part of Object Desktop, Stardock's premiere suite of desktop enhancement programs that let you customize Windows to look, feel, and function how you want it to. Object Desktop is only $49.95 and includes IconDeveloper plus WindowBlinds, DesktopX, IconPackager, ObjectBar, WindowFX, SkinStudio, and much more!