What’s new?

RealWorld Icon Editor was built around a simple universal principle that was accurately expressed thousands of years ago by Aristotle: “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.” Version 2008.1 adds new parts and improves the old ones. Combine them in the right way and the result is almost alive.

Raster image editor

A good share of the 15 months since the last release was spent improving the image editing part of the application. The editor is now much better suited for preparing images for conversion to icons, for retouching of icons, and also for creating icons in image editor from scratch.

Many of the new features were never before available in any icon editor and some of them have never been used in any image editing software at all. Let’s name the most important ones:

• Arbitrary (not just rectangular) selections - actually masks, because there are 256 levels of “selected-ness” per pixel. Selections can be blurred.
• Sub-pixel precision - this is not just anti-aliasing for edge smoothing. Drawn shapes can be positioned with floating point precision, a feature normally seen only in vector image editors.
• Mouse gestures - users can invoke actions (tool change, application of filter, undo, …) by performing a mouse gesture.
• Rich tools - each tool can be configured. For example the LINE tool allows you to choose join and cap style, dashing pattern, and automatically close shape to create a polygon.
• Powerful scripting - the scripting subsystem is comparable to scripting in GIMP of Photoshop. For example the “Bevel” and “Background glow” filters or the “Create preview of icon” operations are scripted.

And that’s not all, there are many minor features like: pen pressure sensitive brush tool, ability to run filters compatible with Adobe Photoshop, modern look and feel with arbitrary (non-integral) zoom and live preview of outcome of every tool, cropping and retouching tools, configurable gradients for shape filling, batch processing, etc.

Icon libraries

Yeah, .icl files are supported. No big deal.

Tagged library

Authors, who create a lot of icons will have the option to store their files in a database and assign any number of tags to each file. Better than file-system and folders.

Online help

Application can only do things that the users can do. Having a good help system is a critical factor in the equation. RealWord Icon Editor has built-in tutorials, context help and document type specific tips. A new component of the help system is a online (continuously updated) detailed help powered by the mediawiki script.

Resources

• RealWorld Icon Editor home page.
• Download the installer here.

Summary

Version 2008.1 of RealWorld Icon Editor is another step on the road to an integrated, functional, and user friendly solution for small graphics authors. The improvements in raster editor eliminate the need to prepare images or retouch generated icons in an external raster editor. The tagged storage provides a convenient way to manage your files and the support for icon libraries allows Windows GUI customizers to package their creations.

Need a tip?

It is not a generally known fact that the current version is capable of providing context help for a lot of user interface elements. In dialogs, click the question mark button in the caption and then the area of interest. In the main window, click the “Context help” toolbar button or menu item and then again the area. Or hit F1 while the control of interest has keyboard focus.

Version 2008.1 will simplify the use case and directly display context help as tooltips for almost all the user interface elements. The tips may eventually become a nuisance for expert users and therefore the feature can be turned off in the application options dialog.

Quick icon assembling

While not a typical scenario, there are people, who want to take a group of pictures of typical icon sizes (16×16, 32×32, 48×48) turn them into one icon. Performing this action in current version would require a lot of clicking. The new version will be able to perform this task in a single step. Create an empty icon and drag and drop all the images in question on the icon directory window and voilà. You have an icon. The application will automatically determine the color depth of the dragged images.

More retouch effects

The retouch tool was extended by 2 more effects:

• Desaturate - lower color saturation of the retouched area. Saturation can also be increased by using negative weight for this effect.
• Colorize - replace hue and saturation of the retouched area using primary color.

Easy to do yet useful.

Summary

The release date is getting near and these are most likely the last functions added. Back to bug fixing.

2000-2004

In the very beginning in 1998, there was a school project - a simple 3D graphics editor called Unicorn3D. In 2001 when Windows XP made its appearance, a successor of Unicorn3D was in development (and still is, although no work has been done on it in a long time) and XP-compatible icons were needed. Sadly (or fortunately?), no icon editor was able to handle the smooth XP icons properly at that time and the image to icon transformation was born. Here is a very early screenshot from that time. No raster editor yet, just a concept of it.

Ugly as it looks, it was able to create XP icons from 3D models. But only with the right person behind the wheel, the user interface was very cryptic.

If you look at the screenshot, you’ll see the application name in the caption of the window: RealWorld Designer, the name of this very blog. The application was meant to be a 3D editor and “virtual world” was a buzzword back in 2000 or so. VirtualWorld Designer did not sound quite right…

2005

In 2005, the RealWorld Designer framework was mature enough to be used as a base of a real application. Making an icon editor was one of the few possible courses of action. Both the 3D part and the raster editing part were not good enough to stand on their own, but the unique combination delivered results.

Raster image editor in this version was quite primitive, with a couple of tools and some scripted filters. The main menu of the application was rather plain and so were the toolbars.

Three versions were released in 2005, improving many usability issues. The last one introduced support for Vista icons. That’s right, RWIE was able to work with Vista icons 1.5 years before Vista was actually released. The other icon editors followed and the the whole scene was ready for Vista icons, when Vista finally arrived. An improvement over the case with XP icons back in 2001.

2006

The 2006.1 version brought many improvements. The core scenario (3D->image->icon) remained the same, but the whole process got more user-friendly. This version featured a batch image to icon converter and improved the ordinary image->icon conversion as well. Generated icon formats were under user’s control and per-formats effects were supported.

Notable new features included a projected shadow tool (for Vista-like shadows) or a couple of new image filters. Each layout (icon editor/image editor/3D editor) had the main menu and toolbars fully under its control, which made the whole application feel more alive.

2007

Version 2006.2 was actually released in 2007, right after Windows Vista. It featured improved batch operations, active support for high DPI display modes, Mac OS icon loading/saving, ability to run image filters compatible with Adobe Photoshop, parameterized 3D models, and many smaller tweaks.

While parameterized objects were possible right from the first release, the improvements to the Rendered Image (snapshot) document type made them practical in this version. For example on the screenshot, the colors and the rotation of the wheels are controlled by parameters. Version 2006.2 was quite successful and it was used for more than just icons.

2008

Version 2008.1 will be released in May and its focus will be on the long neglected raster editor. The old raster editor will be kicked out and replaced by a brand new and much more powerful core with plug-in based tools, fill styles and image masks. There are new native image filters and a redesigned scripting interface.

Another of the new features will be the support for icon libraries and a system for storing files in database with tags for fast access.

Looking forward

Where do we go from here? That’s a good question, there are so many possibilities and so little time. The raster editor can be further enhanced by more tools, also layer support would help at this stage. Or maybe a vector image editor? What about the 3D editor, it could use some improvements. Or a better integration with file system (like the Axialis librarian)? Improving help system would help as well. Hm… Eventually, all of these topics will be addressed, but it is going to take years. Exciting years.

Simplicity

Picture Resizer was designed to be usable by people with almost no computer skills. All you need to do is drag and drop files or folders on the tool’s icon. Target size can be specified by simply renaming the tool.

There are of course alternate ways. You can easily add one or more commands to Explorer context menu. There is also a 3rd party GUI that lets you pick the size in a dialog window.

Power

The tool is indeed powerful. Here is a list of things it does implicitly or when asked to. Can any other resizer do the same?

• Able to resize files in all subfolders.
• High quality coverage-based and gamma-aware resizing method.
• Multiple ways to specify target size:
  • maximum width, height, larger side, smaller side or frame (keeps aspect ratio)
  • specified width and height
  • specified percentage
  • maximum file size in kB
  • by resolution (DPI)
• Configurable compression quality.
• Skip files smaller than the target size.
• Process files in parallel on multi-core processors (new in 3.0).
• Change aspect ratio while preserving shapes using seam carving (new in 3.0).
• Generate customized reports (for example html fragments) based on the processed files.
• Work with extra large images in a native 64-bit edition.
• Sharpen the resized images.

New in version 3.0

Version 3.0 is able to use multiple processors or multiple cores to resize multiple images in parallel.

Another and rater unique new feature is the ability to change aspect ratio (with the -g switch) of pictures using the image carving method. The method takes image content into account and removes least significant portions of the image first. It usually gives better results than cropping and is fully automated.

Note how the clouds are closer to each other on the right photo instead of being distorted by the aspect ratio change. This function is ideally suited to adjust large photos to your LCD display.

Resources

Download the Picture Resizer freeware tool from its homepage.

Just like with the previous ones, the 2008.1 version introduces new functions, extends the old ones and also improves the user interface of the application.

The most notable changes were already described in previous posts:

• Raster editor redesigned
• Icon libraries support
• Tagged library
• …and more: improved scripting, drag and drop, image filter dialogs, batch processing, etc.

And that’s all for this post. I’ve go to get back to fixing the last known bugs, tuning the configuration, and preparing the installation package…

The application can be downloaded from its homepage at: http://icofx.ro/

First impressions

Installation was quick and without problems, even on Vista. Everything worked fine and with no crashes, except for the controls for file association, which were grayed out, probably due to UAC.

You can open multiple icon files in the main editor window. There is also a couple of floating palette windows for color selection (nice one!), tool selection, preview and a file browser with file thumbnails. All the windows are simple and functional and people should have no trouble figuring out what each control does. A small inconvenience is the fact that the floating windows only float inside the main frame and if you try to resize the frame, the lower part of the floating windows may become invisible and they obscure the status bar.

Features

Tools

The editor has all the commonly used tools and also two not-so-common tools for darkening/brightening and sharpening/softening parts of the icons. These may come handy for retouching of icons.

The application also supports a “Smooth edges” mode that applies to some tools, but instead of properly anti-aliasing the drawn shapes (as the majority of other icon editors do), IcoFX fakes it and just draws the border pixels with increased transparency, if you want smooth shapes, you’d better draw you pictures elsewhere. Another minor annoyance may be the fact that the application does not show the preview of the drawn shape for lines, rectangles or ellipses and only draws an outline, which does not help much. These shortcoming are only minor, because the tools in any currently available icon editor are not really powerful enough to be used to draw a professional icon from scratch anyway ( that may change in a few weeks or so ).

Filters

IcoFX supports all the basic color adjustments filters, rotation, a drop shadow effect, and a couple of other filters based on a 5×5 convolution matrix. Some of them are useful and for the other ones, well, at least they have an intriguing name. If a filter has options, there is a fixed-size preview window available.

Image->Icon

IcoFX supports basically 2 (or 3?) ways to convert images to icons. The first one offers a user interface to pick the region of the image to create icon from, but it only creates a single image format. The second one lets you create multiple formats in batch mode. The third way is something in between, you can create icon with multiple images from an image of an already opened icon (sounds confusing?).

Icon libraries

One of the new features of the 1.6 version is the ability to modify icons inside an executable file and create icon libraries. The functionality can be accessed from a context menu in the file explorer (create new icon libraries) or from the main menu, where you can modify existing icon libraries.

The application allows you to add/delete/replace individual icons from files. No drag and drop or another nifty feature available in some commercial alternatives, but that is no big deal. Icon names of ICL files are not supported as well, but again they are not really necessary.

Extras

IcoFX joins the group of application able to load Mac OS .icns files and also to save them. Good work.

To help get new uses started, there is a couple of tutorials available, which is not a common thing with freeware applications. Great work.

The application has an Explorer pane, which works as a permanently available open dialog with previews and with favorite folders. If you have the screen space to afford to have it permanenty open (and you most likely do), it can save some clicks.

Summary

There is only a single freeware icon edit comparable to IcoFX and that is the Greenfish Icon Editor. Each of them has certain advantages and certain disadvantages. IcoFX supports Mac icons, can modify icons in an executable file and supports batch conversions. Greenfish IE supports image masks and has slightly better tools and filters. Choose for yourself. In any case, if you are a regular user of a freeware product, consider donating some money to the author, they have to eat too.

Reasons for having a raster editor

Before describing the actual changes made to the raster editor, lets look at the reasons why icon editors usually provide some kind of a raster editor and in which situations plays the raster editor an important role.

1. Creating icons in raster editor from scratch. This is an obvious reason, but only very few people are able to actually create good enough icons with the limited tools provided by the icon editors. Still, people, who are new to creating icons, usually choose this method. After a while, many switch to a vector or to a 3D editor and this method becomes irrelevant.
2. Retouching raw icons created by other means. Icons are usually small and this fact requires special care. An image created in a vector or 3D editor often needs to be adjusted. Changing individual pixels, adjusting brightness, contrast or color saturation, sharpening, softening, or adding a shadow are typical tasks.
3. Preparing source images before conversion to icons. This task involves erasing background, removing empty borders or adjusting color balance. In more complicated cases people may want to remove perspective, adjust transparency or add a special effect like a picture frame, etc.

Change overview

The new raster editor contains improvements for each mentioned scenario. Let’s review the most notable changes.

Modern look and feel

The raster editor can display the image at arbitrary zoom and saves screen real estate that would be wasted if only integral zoom factors were possible, which is the case with every other icon editor. Image can always by zoomed in or out using mouse wheel and panned by dragging by the mouse wheel (or middle button).

Selections in raster images (masks)

Selections can be used to specify which portions of an image should be affected by a filter or a tool. This helps a lot when retouching icons or preparing images for conversion.

Selections are defined by a 8-bit number per pixel. If a pixel is 50% selected the applied filter will affect it only from 50%.

Selections can be defined in various ways: by a rectangle selection tool, by a magic wand or by a selection “meta-tool”. The meta-tool uses one of the other drawing tools (ellipse, polygon, brush, …) to define the region to select. Modifier keys (SHIFT, CTRL) allow you to add, remove, or negate selection. Selections can also be affected by filters - they can be for example blurred.

Photoshop-compatible filters can access the selection as well.

Sub-pixel precision

One of the biggest problem when creating small pictures from scratch is the alignment of coordinates. On a 16×16 pixels image, half a pixel matters. Vector image editors do not suffer from this problem, because the images are scalable and as a consequence, they use floating point coordinates. The raster editor in RWIE comes as close as possible a raster editor can. Coordinates of drawn shapes are using floating point values and they can be adjusted after the initial definition using control handles.

Sub-pixel precision mode can be turned off and on by a mouse click.

New and improved tools

Many of the old tools have new options. Rectangles and ellipses can be rotated. New points can be easily added to polylines and curves (by dragging a middle-point).

There are also many new tools. A brush with configurable shape and size (with tablet pressure support), a crop and transformation tools (with perspective adding/removing), retouching (brighten, darken, soften, …), and cloning.

Shapes can be filled by solid color, color gradients, or patterns.

The interface to drawing tools and fill styles is open and software developers can add their own tools or fill styles as plug-ins.

Filter scripting

The scripting subsystem based on JavaScript has undergone a major change. Scripted operations can use the native filters and also some of the tools from the raster editor.

Mouse gestures

The editor can recognize a predefined number of gestures and users can assign actions to each gesture. The action can be for example a execution of image filter, a change of an active drawing tool or a very handy Undo or Redo commands.

Summary

The changes are numerous and the new raster editor can do many things never seen before in any icon editor or even in a general purpose image editor. Nevertheless, this is just the beginning. A first step on a road to offer a real alternative to Adobe or Corel products in the area of small 2D web graphics.

Dragging and dropping files

The currently released versions of RealWorld icon or cursor editors are able to accept files dragged from Explorer or another compatible file manager and dropped on the application window. What actually happens depends on the dropped files and on the place, where the files were dropped. Here is an overview:

• Image files dropped on a raster editor window are pasted as floating selections.
• Icon file dropped on window showing images inside an icon will be combined with the icon in the window (blended over them).
• Image files and static or animated cursors dropped on a window with animated cursor frames will be appended to the end of the animation.
• .rwcommands files dropped on a toolbar will add the commands from the file as new toolbar buttons.
• Icon and icon libraries dropped on a window showing icons in an icon library will add the icons to the library (Icon libraries will be supported in the next version of RWIE).
• Cursor files dropping a on a cursor role panel when switched to the customize page will be activated for that role.
• Files or folders dropped on the main window while the window is switched to the batch mode will apply active batch operation to the files.
• Files dropped on the main window (not in batch mode) will be opened in the editor.

As you can see the list is long and it will be growing in the future. Occasional user does not have the time to memorize it and it is a shame. Hence…

Giving the proper feedback

Future versions of RW applications will not only show a preview of the dragged image as it is common in Windows Explorer, but also display a tooltip describing what happens after the mouse button is released. The following screenshot demonstrates the feature in action while dragging a .jpg file with the famous Linux penguin. Now, the only thing to remember is to give drag and drop a try. Often.

Summary

Software with many function is a nice thing to have, but the value of a function depends on the number of people actually making use of it. Although the tooltip does not enhance the functionality, it works on the other part of the equation…

Controversy of .icl files

I have to admit, I do not consider icon libraries (.icl files) to be particularly useful. This is the main reason why RWIE did not support them in the past. A zip file usually does a better job for transferring files over the internet and individual .ico files on a local computer are just fine for both application developers and customizers. Additionally, no particular software is needed to examine and manage .ico files, a file manager is enough.

But, there seems to be people, who do not share my opinion and just love to create icon libraries. Well, the group of applications supporting .icl files is going to grow with the release of the next version or RW Icon Editor…

Functionality

• Open 16-bits and 32-bits icon libraries, save 32-bits ones (e.g. legacy 16-bits .icl files will be converted to the new format and will be usable on Vista and 64-bits systems).
• Edit icons in the library directly (look at the screenshot). If you need more space for the library and less for the editor, just drag the splitter bar.
• Change icon names and identifiers.
• Save individual icons from a library.
• Delete icons from library, copy/move icons between icon libraries using clipboard (multi-selection enabled).
• Add icons to the library by creating them from scratch, by pasting them or by dragging and dropping .ico or .icl files on the window with list of icons in a library. Multiple files can be dropped at once.

Support for batch extraction of icons from libraries and other files was already mentioned in previous article.

Limitations

The .icl file is just a renamed .dll with a special resource block, RWIE will remove all other resources from the file. To customize an icon of an application without damaging the application, use the already available function (Main menu->Icon->Customize application icon) . That function uses native Windows functions and is safe to use with normal executable files.

As mentioned above, icon libraries have a single addition to an ordinary .dll file format and this is the ability to record names of icons. Unfortunately, this addition was not designed with international characters in mind. Since there is no specification regarding character encoding, I hereby publicly state, that RWIE will use UTF-8 encoding for icon names.

Summary

If you are an icon library fan, you are free to rejoice now. Beside the already mentioned functions, icon libraries can also be accessed from scripts, which makes RWIE the most flexible tool for .icl manipulation. It is possible to configure the editor to for example create previews of selected icons, save them, apply filter to all images, generate new image formats, etc. If you’d like to have these or another operations available by default, please leave a comment describing your needs.

I’d bet I am not alone in this situation and every full-time professional designer must deal with the chaos of previous work. How to categorize the files? By time, by project, by topic, by file type? What if I need to reuse an older file and adjust it a bit for another project? Should a create a copy of the file in the folder of the new project? Should I update the old file? How the hell did I name that 3D model of a globe? Was it earth.u3d? Which one is the latest version? I just spent 10 minutes looking for it and I still can’t find it!

Hierarchical file systems

The concept of folders (or directories) is very old. It is good for computers and to certain level also for humans. But only to certain level. While having 10 folders with 50 files in each one is better than having 500 files on a heap, once the number of folders starts to grow and it becomes necessary to use folders inside folders, the system quickly becomes unusable. The problem becomes more apparent if a hierarchy created by one human is handed to another person and the second one is asked to find something in the hierarchy.

The core of the problem is the fact that things can be categorized in many different ways and all of them all correct in certain contexts. The hierarchical file system is unable to capture this property of the real world. Imagine to have things classified in folders according to color. If the need arises to find thing with rectangular shape, the classification by color is useless.

Besides, there is a group of computer users (usually older people) that has difficulty to learn the fundamentals of hierarchical file systems. Should we blame the people or the system?

Associative file systems

There were many attempts to break away from the hierarchical file systems and switch to a system that better fits the human brain. Windows Vista was supposed to have such mechanism (known as WinFS), but it did not make it to the final version. Online storage services (such as flickr) or bookmarking services (del.icio.us) take a different road and they are relatively successful. They use tags instead of a folders and instead of imposing a hierarchy, they allow classification into multiple categories. Humans have much less trouble navigating in a tagged system than in a hierarchical one.

Dangers of tagged systems

In a hierarchical system, there is always a single path to a file (not considering hard links). With tags, all is a little fuzzier. Hierarchical system always presents the user a limited number of choices: there is an active folder with constant number of subfolders and files. On the other hand, tags can be combined arbitrarily and choosing one tag does not limit the choice of a second one.

Due to this element of uncertainty, a good user interface of a tagged system is crucial to its success. Or, in another words, if the user interface fails to provide better experience than a user interface of a classic hierarchical system, all is lost and people would not use it. Hence, the user interface must:

• Be fast and responsive.
• Present files in a manner that allows fast and correct choices by users. Having thumbnails is a must.
• Do not rely on user remembering the tags, instead present list of most often used tags and allow to pick from a list.
• Provide help.

Tags in RealWorld Designer

RealWorld Icon Editor will be the first of the rw-designer apps to use the tagged file system. The database will reside on a local hard drive in a single file and all will be implemented using the sqlite library.

The Tagged storage takes form of a plug-in and all appropriate open/save dialogs will offer the choice to use classic file system or the tagged storage. Users will be able to:

• Pick a database file to use. Backup and restore the database.
• Merge contents of two databases. This will allow multiple users to easily share their work and cooperate on larger projects.
• Import/export individual files to file system.
• Attach arbitrary tags to each file stored in the tagged storage.
• Display files matching given tags.
• Maintain multiple revisions of the same file.

The example files shipped with previous versions of RW Icon Editor will now be moved into the tagged storage for better orientation (thanks to the thumbnails) and to let the users become familiar with the concepts.

Highlights

Files matching the chosen tags are displayed using tiles with thumbnails and all basic information about the file. Tooltips provide additional info: last modification date and actual tags. Optionally, they also display content dependent data like for example number of icons in an icon library, dimensions of an image, parameter names of a parameterizable 3D object, etc. They will also display your own notes (BTW, you can attach a note to every stored file).

Files can be dragged and dropped between Windows Explorer and the tagged storage.

It is no problem having multiple files with the same name and tags. If you want to keep an older version of a file, simply check the “Create new revision” box while saving.

The tagged storage is seamlessly integrated with the application, because RealWorld Designer was designed with storage plug-ins in mind. A 3D model stored on local hard disk can safely use a texture from the tagged storage.

Files stored in the tagged storage are compressed and while there might be a small overhead introduced by the database, in a typical scenario the database file will occupy less space on your hard drive than the individual files would.

Summary

Introducing an alternative to such an established concept as hierarchical file system is not an easy thing to do. The idea of an associative file system has been in my mind for almost 8 years and I am certainly not the only one who has been tempted to realize it. It offers great benefits, but it may also fail spectacularly.

People hate to give up what they have already learned to use and learn something else. So, please, keep your mind open and give the tagged storage a chance. It may just get under your skin and you may find yourself wondering how could you have lived without it for such a long time.

The tagged storage will be available in a couple of weeks in the beta build of RealWorld Icon Editor 2008.1. If you wish to become a beta-tester, send an email to info@rw-designer.com.