What Do I need To Create an Icon Set?
 

Lately I've been thinking of making an icon set for Iconplus/appicon/zlauncher, and I was wondering what I need exactly to do it. I already have the artistic skills :rolleyes: , so what I need to know is what drawing package I should use (own PhotoShop), and what I need to do to convert them to the required format.

Thanks,

Photoshop and/or PaintShopPro are both excellent for the task. For building and compiling the iconset, I like Festus440's ZL Iconset Factory available at his website. You could also use his freeware PFCD application to decompile an exisiting iconset, then edit the icons as you wish and recompile. Hope this helps, looking forward to your iconset, good luck!

Sorry, but I don't think I'm going to do it. If ZLIF was free I would give it go but it's not. It is really to bad because I had already put an hour into it (btw my idea was to create a template icon and then modify for each individual icon- I had already done the template, and man it was awesome!). I tried looking into creating an Iconplus pack, but I was a little over my head with PILRC. Sorry for disappointing.

It's pretty cheap. $5.00 at PalmGear. And right now you can have it for 20% off with JUNESALE as your promo code on checkout. Four bucks is worth it for the fun of making your own icon sets. At least to me it is, whether I ever share them or not.

Hey FerdFerd, am I losing my mind, or did you not post something earlier to the same effect? This is weird because I don't see that post anymore, did you delete it? Just kind of wondering because if not I'll schedule an appointment with my Doc immediately :D

I posted something about HP Skin Studio here, which I then realized wasn't relevant to your project, so I deleted it. No need to make the appointment. I later looked up ZL Iconset Factory and found that it is also cheap.

This was the look I was trying to accomplish. Have a uniform frame and a custom middle, if I wanted I'm sure I could make it a lot better, because this was like a half hour of playing with Tealpaint.

Hello again,

Just one more quick question. Is there another way to compile a ZLauncher iconset than using ZLIF? In my spare time, I've learned how to use pilrc, so can I do it with that? I've created the set in the IconPlus format (which is done with pilrc), and think it would just be easier to compile it with that, if it's possible (hoping to just change the Creator Mapping Table and ID's).

Yes you could use PilRc. However, PFCD will be easier to use (and I give it away on my web site). Also, PilRc never implemented packbits or rle compression. My compiler in PFCD does, and will produce smaller files than PilRc in most cases.

The information on how to create an iconset, and modify the mapping table is supplied with ZL. Keep in mind you must not only change the creator id's but also sort them in the correct order. From IconSetDoc-->

"All icons in the IconSet must follow the order rule of icons:

The item which has a larger TypeID must be followed by the one which has a smaller TypeID. If the TypeIDs of two items are same, the item which has the larger CreatorID will be followed by the one which has a smaller CreatorID. Note, capital letter is less than lower case letter. For example, '0' < '9' < 'A' < 'Z' < 'a' < 'z'."

This is a pain to do by hand (Which is one reason I wrote ZLIF). You might be able to do something with Excel to generate the table and then translate it to hex.

F440

Thanks very much for the info, I'll look into it further.