Windows Vista Icons

What is new in Windows Vista Icons? | Editing Vista icons | Windows Vista Icon FAQs

There are some differences in between Windows Vista icons and Windows XP icons and explains how did Microsoft extend the .ICO file format. But to know this better one should have to be already familiar with Windows XP icon format. Windows Vista Beta 1 contained 104 hi-resolution icons.

When we examine the high-resolution icons, one thing we notice that the general style used in Beta 1 icons is not at all uniform. Many differences found like, Some icons don't have shadow, some have as classic shadow pointing to bottom right corner, some to the bottom left corner, some have 3D-like shadow.

As well as one can observe the difference in the reflection effects too. Microsoft trying to mostly change the icons in the final Vista builds and definitely gives them more uniform look and feel.

Icon format changes in Vista

The ability just to go for a 256x256 image inside an icon is older one, it was possible in XP and even in previous systems as well. But when we consider the disk space, we will come to know about the problem is that an icon with all 12 formats would require more than 400kB on disk.

Which is considerable and more than a ~25kB for a whole Windows XP icon. Now some thinkers would have solved this problem by extending the icon format. This is done by changing the stored form of these icon images, in case of windows vista now they are stored in PNGs.

As PNG compression, the icon size is almost reduced and as well this is the loss-less and supports 8bit alpha channel, the quality of icon is not at all lowered.

Truecolor versions of default folder icon from Vista is shown in below image. This icon contains 12 formats namely 16x16, 32x32, 48x48 and 256x256 pixels, all in 16M, 256 and 16 colors. But the larger versions are compressed in Vista for saving the storage space.

Windows Vista Explorer

The Windows vista Explorer is having many newer abilities; it has ability to zoom the displayed items in and out. Zooming is done using a slider and it is continuous of the panel in upper left corner. The windows Vista Explorer makes use of high-resolution 256x256 icons if these sizes are at all available.

The following images displayed of Windows Explorer provides you how exactly it looks like, as Microsoft itself created high-resolution version of several icons like Network, Folder, My Computer and many more. But this is the only ability limited to system icons.

what actually control the zooming effect of the zooming, is the slider on the panel in left upper corner.