Free application icons for Windows needed

[JonRB]

Hi folks

I have a new simple freeware Windows app I want to release, but I don't have a suitable icon for it.

I only need something generic like a bunch of keys, a bank safe, a lock, or anything like that.
It's for a simple password helper application, so anything that says "password" or "security" will do.

Usual sizes for a Windows app needed - 16x16, 24x24, 32x32, and 48x48 in various colour depths, all in a .ico file.
But I could really do with it being free to purchase and royalty-free as this is a freeware app.

Thanks in advance
Jon

[dilbert]

If you have VC9, then the folder;
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\VS2008ImageLibrary\1033
Contains a (10MB) zip file with thousands of images and animations in about ten formats. I don't think there are any licence restrictions, and there are more details here;
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms247035.a...
Where I think you can download the library if you don't already have it.

Edited by dilbert on Monday 26th May 19:55

[JonRB]

Thanks dilbert. I'm using VC8, but I'll follow the link and see what I can find.

Edit: Oh, here we go - C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\VS2005ImageLibrary\VS2005ImageLibrary.zip

Edit2: Bum. Doesn't have that many icons in it. I'll have a look on the VC7.1 disc and see if there are any more there.

Edited by JonRB on Monday 26th May 20:06

[dilbert]

If you can't find them, mail me, and I'll return some suitable ones.

I'm looking at vista style icons for keys, padlocks, usb sticks, and compact flash cards, smart media cards.....

Edited by dilbert on Monday 26th May 20:08

[dilbert]

I just looked, at one of five directories with premade resource media in it. Theres about fifty or so icons, but I'm not to bothered to look into the images directory, where there are many others. The thing with the images is that it takes a bit of effort to tweak them, downsample them, and pull them together into an icon. It's much easier that way than having to faff around developing shadows and everything.

I think also you can "suck out" most any dll or exe for it's embedded resources, with Visual Studio. Just open the exe or dll directly with visual studio, and it launches into resource view.....

Traditionally, microsoft have always provided "moricons.dll" for just this purpose, and there is always "shell32.dll".

Edited by dilbert on Monday 26th May 20:20

[JonRB]

dilbert said:

I think also you can "suck out" most any dll or exe for it's embedded resources, with Visual Studio. Just open the exe or dll directly with visual studio, and it launches into resource view.....

Yup. With VC6 you could do that no problem. But with VC8 it seems to prevent you copying icon resources out of a dll, although I guess you could laboriously cut & paste the pixels from each icon size. I'm sure under VC6 you could just drag & drop the whole icon and get all the sizes.

[dilbert]

JonRB said:

dilbert said:

I think also you can "suck out" most any dll or exe for it's embedded resources, with Visual Studio. Just open the exe or dll directly with visual studio, and it launches into resource view.....

Yup. With VC6 you could do that no problem. But with VC8 it seems to prevent you copying icon resources out of a dll, although I guess you could laboriously cut & paste the pixels from each icon size. I'm sure under VC6 you could just drag & drop the whole icon and get all the sizes.

I think you need an upgrade to VC9.
I did from VC6 which is why I assumed it had always been there. Certainly I just checked, and VC9 has the "export" option, to save as an icon.
9 works well on XP if you're a vista hater too.

ETA,
I've been really impressed with VC9. It still has the odd bug, but it's no big deal. The only thing I've found to be a minor irritant is that the incremental linker occasionally coredumps. You have to clean and rebuild.

An example of it's greatness though, is that I needed to do some assembler just a day ago. I figured I was going to have real pain, since there is no template for an assembler file. Anyhow, I just told it to create a standard text file, with an "asm" extension, and it is now assembling the object and linking it into my project, as though it is native. All I had to to was to enable the "assembler tool" in the allowed build tools for the project.

Sweet.

Edited by dilbert on Monday 26th May 20:39

[JonRB]

Oh, it's ok, I've done it.

I was sneaky and opened the icon I wanted in the binary editor, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C and then opened my local ico file also in the binary editor, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-S, job's a goon 'un.

Yay.