IconLover : Java Glossary

It can do anti-alias smoothing, smooth scaling, spline curves, alpha channel. It has the usual paint functions. Its main weakness is converting high colour to 256 colours. It does not know how to do the octree algorithm to select the optimal set of colours. Once you place something it is fixed. It does not maintain the entire image as a set of movable vector objects. You get a great improvement in your icons just by loading them, converting to 32-bit alpha channel and clicking smooth and perhaps adding a drop shadow.

It is missing a useful simple feature, the ability resize to 50%. You must calculate the image size width and height yourself. To use the smoothing function, you must turn on high-colour and alpha-channel. It does not seem to have a way to reduce the colour depth and maintain alpha-channel transparency. The more I used it, the more I liked it. I own a copy. The company is headquartered nearby in Vancouver, BC Canada.

Icon-Lover costs .

Disadvantages

• If you resize an image and want to keep the same aspect ratio, you have to calculate the new size with a hand calculator or your own little program.
• If you select an area to crop, you cannot adjust it, just start over from scratch.
• If you select an area to crop, you cannot do the crop with a double click. You have to click crop on the menu.

Bugs

• It crashes if you try to convert a 256 × 256 image into an icon.
• It sometimes creates transpent icons that display correctly when attached to a shortcut, but show with a black background in Windows explorer. You must remove all images except for the offical Vista set. It does not warn you when you add extras.
• When you create icons, sometimse it shrinks the image to about ¼ size.