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Review
This is a quick review
ArtIcons Pro provides great opportunities for working with Windows XP and Windows Vista icons. You will be able to handle Vista Icons with ease. In order to make Vista icons compatible with Windows XP you can save them without any compression.
Vista Icons introduce a new style of iconography that brings a higher level of detail and sophistication to Windows imagery. First, the style of Windows Aero-style icons is more realistic than illustrative, but not quite photorealistic. The icons are symbolic images - they should look better than photorealistic. Second, icons have a maximum size of 256 x 256, making them suitable for high-DPI displays. These high-resolution icons allow for high visual quality in list views with large icons. Finally, wherever practical, fixed document icons are replaced by thumbnails of the content, making documents easier to identify and find. Thus, Articons Pro is a beeline to refining the visuals of your program and making it more communicative for users.
A picture of a maximum size of 256 x 256 to be used as an icon, in principle, is supported by XP, yet such an icon occupies 400Kb of disk space, which is far more than standard 25Kb of an XP icon. Aha-Soft has again found a way to cast off these shackles: Articons Pro uses advanced PNG compression to save images without losses and supports semitransparent images with 8bit alpha channel. That technology reduces the size of an icon only, leaving the quality invariable.
Articons Pro will help you to obtain the modern Windows Vista look. All you need is just to redesign your program's most prominent icons to use the Aero-style. From this time onwards Vista Icons crafted by Articons Pro will strongly impact users' overall impression of your programs' visual design. Articons Pro will improve the usability of your software by making programs, objects, and actions easier to identify and find.
The following full-length review applies to version 4.1
ArtIcons Pro provides great opportunities for working with Windows XP and Windows Vista icons. You will be able to handle Vista Icons with ease. In order to make Vista icons compatible with Windows XP you can save them without any compression.
Use this powerful utility to find and extract, edit, import and export icons and manage icon libraries. ArtIcons Pro contains a variety of paint tools allowing creation and editing of icons with image formats in either standard or custom sizes in color depths up to 32-bit True Color. Icons can be imported from imager and library files and even from executables. ArtIcons allows you to arrange icons into libraries.
One of the main functions of ArtIcons Pro is to customize the default Windows icons - you can simply rename them or use the 'colorize' options when you want to generate artistic harmony between the hues of the wallpaper and the rest of the desktop. Moreover, you can replace the icons with some created by yourself (assuming you are also a bit of a designer) or you can browse through the numerous icon packs and take your pick. This way you can disguise certain folders or applications so that unauthorized users or 'prying' eyes won't be able to identify your personal data.
Articons Pro will help you to obtain the modern Windows Vista look. All you need is just to redesign your program's most prominent icons to use the Aero-style. From this time onwards Vista Icons crafted by Articons Pro will strongly impact users' overall impression of your programs' visual design. Articons Pro will improve the usability of your software by making programs, objects, and actions easier to identify and find. |
- very easy to use interface
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Reviewed by: Daniel Mantilla Reviewer rating:  |
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Screenshots
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