32bit image quality in menus and tool bar strips

[Guest]

Hi all,

Controls such as the tree view or list view use image lists hence I can set
the quality of icons to 32bit. This way they look their best.

Unfortunately both the menu and tool bar strip control don't use image lists.

How can I still achieve 32bit icon quality (icons are natively 32bit) in
these controls? I don't see any such property in either of them.

Thanks,
Adam

 

[Homer J Simpson]

Controls such as the tree view or list view use image lists hence I can
set
the quality of icons to 32bit. This way they look their best.

Unfortunately both the menu and tool bar strip control don't use image
lists.

How can I still achieve 32bit icon quality (icons are natively 32bit) in
these controls? I don't see any such property in either of them.

Don't they use png files now?

 

[Guest]

Don't they use png files now?

Could be.... Does this mean I need to convert then icons to PNG files? If so
what program may I use for this?

 

[Homer J Simpson]

"Homer J Simpson" wrote:

Could be.... Does this mean I need to convert then icons to PNG files? If
so
what program may I use for this?

I can only suggest you search the web. PNG is a standard format.

PS. See http://www.kennyandkarin.com/Kenny/CodeCorner/Tools/IconBrowser/
for some interesting info.

 

[Adam Honek]

Yes I'm doing that in parallel to this thread.

Maybe it's just me but I don't see why MS didn't use imagelists for all
controls, it would
keep things consistent. Perhaps this is something for VS.net SP1.

Thanks,
Adam

 

[Homer J Simpson]

Yes I'm doing that in parallel to this thread.

Maybe it's just me but I don't see why MS didn't use imagelists for all
controls, it would
keep things consistent. Perhaps this is something for VS.net SP1.

Image lists were a PITA. I kept having to disconnect, update and reconnect
them to the controls. This is better.

 

[gene kelley]

Hi all,

Controls such as the tree view or list view use image lists hence I can set
the quality of icons to 32bit. This way they look their best.

Unfortunately both the menu and tool bar strip control don't use image lists.

How can I still achieve 32bit icon quality (icons are natively 32bit) in
these controls? I don't see any such property in either of them.

Thanks,
Adam

If your icons are truely 32 bit (so-called XP style) but with an .ico
extension, they will load in the menu and toolstrips. Just chnage the
file type in the open dialog to all (*.*) when browsing for the
file(s). If the icons are not 32 bit, you will get an invalid format
error.

Gene

 

[Adam Honek]

Yes they do load however they look visually worse than in my treeview that
I've set
to use a 32bit colour depth.

Even at 24 bits they look bad so it must be the menu and tool strip controls
having either
bugs or problems displaying 32bit colour depth when using icon files.

These are true Windows XP 32bit icons.

It's instant to see the quality difference amid these controls.

Adam

 

[gene kelley]

Yes they do load however they look visually worse than in my treeview that
I've set
to use a 32bit colour depth.

Even at 24 bits they look bad so it must be the menu and tool strip controls
having either
bugs or problems displaying 32bit colour depth when using icon files.

These are true Windows XP 32bit icons.

It's instant to see the quality difference amid these controls.

Adam

Just to clarify, a true "XP" icon is 32 bit, contains an alpha
channel, and generally appears anti-aliased, may even have a soft
shadow. The overall appearance is that of a "blurred" icon compared
to the same icon in it's 24 bit version which appears somewhat
sharper.

Icon files labeled as XP type icons can often be multi-res - muti-res
meaning that the icon file contains various sizes of the icon in both
32 bit and 24 bit versions. Some of these files may even contain 256
and 16 color versions of the icon.

I've never used the imagelist and treeview in VB2005. But I did try a
small test. At this end, even though the imagelist was set to 32 bit,
the actual icon displayed in the treeview was a non-32 bit version of
the icon. Using the same icon file for the toolstrip, the toolstrip
button displays the 32 bit version. So in this test case, yes, there
is a difference between the two controls. On the face of it, it would
appear that difference lies with either the imagelist or treeview or
both as one or the other does not appear to support 32 bit icon
display.

Gene

 

[Homer J Simpson]

I've replaced the menu strip, tool bar and tree view to all use 32bit
WinXP PNG's and the quality
seems to be consistent now.

MS needs to decide whether to use imagelists for all controls or not, at
the moment we're having a
maybe this and maybe that scenario.

There's a lot of that in 2005.

 

[Adam Honek]

I've replaced the menu strip, tool bar and tree view to all use 32bit WinXP
PNG's and the quality
seems to be consistent now.

MS needs to decide whether to use imagelists for all controls or not, at the
moment we're having a
maybe this and maybe that scenario.

Adam