User's Guide |
| Opens... | from menu: Window > Builder... | ||||||||||||
| Info | Window in which the icons are edited. Allows you to open images, build and preview icons and masks, and save the icons. | ||||||||||||
| Description | It is hoped that you will find the windows quite self-explanatory. Most of the window's controls have their menu equivalent, so it is recommended to check the help as well as behaviour of the application. The window is divided into logical parts dedicated to each step needed to create your icons:
Image & Recent Images Picture field under the Image label shows the active image. Below the field there is a Open... button - click on it to open a picture or drag a picture to the picture field. You may drag picture files, picture clippings or even pictures from the other application, e.g. PhotoShop. Each image, opened or dragged, is automatically added to recent images library. Recent Images list allows fast and easy access to all images you need for the icon you build. Below the Recent Images list, there are 2 buttons: Open, and Build. These buttons are enabled only if there is a selected image in the list. By clicking Open button, selected image will become the active one and will be displayed above, in the picture field. Build button quickly builds all icons and masks from the selected image without making the image active. Classic & New Icons / OS X Icons First thing you can notice in each of these two sections of the window is a big rectangle filled with some picture, pattern, or color. These rectangles represent the Iconeer virtual desktop. When building an icon, it will be displayed on this desktop. There is one button just in the left-right corner of the desktop labeled C (means Classic) or N (means New). These is the Suite View button. It determines, which mask will be used when icons are drawn on virtual desktop. Classic icons use 1-bit mask, New icons use 8-bit mask. Under Standard/New suite view there are 3 buttons with blue arrows on the left side of the desktop which create icons by size. There are also 4 buttons below the desktop which create icons by color depth + 2 more buttons, for 1-bit and 8-bit masks. Notice that each arrow directs to a label marking color depth or size on the opposite side of the desktop. Button on the left-bottom corner of the desktop with double arrow creates all icon sizes and depths including masks. There are also two more buttons, one next to each mask button. These are the mask mode switchers. These tell Iconeer how the mask will be created from the image - as a solid rectangle or as a picture with transparency. Similarly, there is a section dedicated to OS X icons only. OS X icons are large, use only one color depth and one kind of mask.For purpose of using space in the window effectively, the arrangement of objects here is somehow different. There are only 3 pairs of icon-mask objects, one for each of OS X icon sizes. As a result, while in Classic icons section row contains icons of the same size and earch column is dedicated to certain color depth, in OS X icons section row shows icons of the same depth (only one depth here), and 3 columns mean 3 icon sizes. Building icons using the blue arrows works exactly the same way in both icon section, you only need to be careful about the direction. One important thing here to know is, that 256x256 Tiger icon and 512x512 Leopard icon are both scaled down to 128x128. The only reason for this is limited space in the window. 512x512 icon covers 16x the space of 128x128 icon, so it would be impossible to arrange all icon cells in some aesthetical way using their real dimensions. When you know what the controls mean, you can build the icons. As a first step, make sure there is an active image. If not, open one from the disk or from the Recent Items. Iconeer allows you to use different ways how to build the icon. First way is to use buttons around the desktop. Second is just to click on the position of the icon size/depth/mask you wan to create. This will create icon only on this position. Third way is to drag any picture to the specific position. You can drag picture files, picture clippings, pictures from another application (e.g. PhotoShop) or pictures from Iconeer's Recent Images or picture from another icon position. Deleting of the icons happens exactly the same way as creating, the only thing you need to do is to hold <Option> key pressed. Background One cool feature of Iconeer is its virtual desktop. When you create your icons, you can preview it on various colors or desktop pictures so you can make sure the icon masking is done right. You can change the virtual desktop using 4 sets of color rectangle and arrows. First one is for levels of gray, second for solid colors, third for patterns, and fourth for 2-color grid. Use arrows to select color/pattern and then confirm the change by clicking on the color rectangle. Keeping <Option> key pressed while selecting the color/pattern with arrows will change the desktop immediately. Icon Suite When your icon is done, icon suite lets you configure, which sizes and color depths will be actually saved in the icon file. The purpose here is to allow you to save only necessary resources for your icon. For instance, if you do not plan your icon to be used under Classic environment, you may not want to save classic resource forks. You can configure the icon suite by clicking Icon Suite edit button. This will open Icon Suite Editor - follow the link for more details. Output Final task before saving your icon is configuring its format and some other options. This is done in Output Editor, just follow the link for details. Save Icon Clicking Save Icon button or pressing <Enter> key will save the icon in selected format. Your icon is created. | ||||||||||||