Document Icon and Icons For Technical Writers Software for Windows

ArtIcons
$29.95 - Aha-soft

ArtIcons 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 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 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 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 will strongly impact users' overall impression of your programs' visual design. ArtIcons will improve the usability of your software by making programs, objects, and actions easier to identify and find.

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BSCOutline
$25 - Byte-Sized Computing Ltd

BSCOutline is a highly customizable tree view control for use in Web pages, similar to that used by Windows File Manager or Explorer. Features of BSCOutline include: unlimited customizable folder icons in both open and closed states; unlimited customizable document icons; customizable background color or image; customizable font size, face, style and color; a simple data file in ASCII format with comments for legibility; a customizable target frame for documents, with individual override facility; a customisable highlight showing the last viewed document; mouse movement display of the destination URL; options to turn off icons and tree lines; and a partial population facility to speed up very large data structures. Javascript interaction.

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Icon Searcher
$29.95 - SoftPlus

Icon Searcher performs fast scan of all local hard disks for icon images(Support XP style icon). The program handles lots of different file formats, like DLL, EXE, ICO, ICL, OCX, SCR, CPL, BPL, VBX, DRV and extracts all available icons from files to the user-friendly visual image list.

Icons can be saved as separate icon files or copied to the Windows and then pasted into any application, document, or other environment supporting image pasting. This Program store found icons in database and compress them. Icon Searcher uses saving icons as BMP, ICO, JPG, GIF, PNG, PCX, TGA, TIFF files.

Icon Searcher includes the following main features:

* Easy to use GUI.
* Very fast scan speed!
* Found Icons compressed and store in database , saving disk spase.
* Found Icons keep original name and directory name,if icon is extracted ,then keep the extract filename and icon name.
* Support show how many icons per page,can jump any page you want.
* Support standard Windows icon (48x48 32x32,16x16) and Custom icon sizes(8x8,24x24,35x35,72x72,96x96,128x128).
* monochrome,16,256,16-bit, 24-bit,32-bit true color icons full support.
* Format support (.ICO .BMP .JPG .GIF .PNG .PCX .TGA .TIFF) for saving icons to disk.
* Support copy icon to Windows Clipboard.
* Can be minimized or stop while scanning disks for icons.
* Support Filter icon by name, by size, by color..
* Support save your own icon collection,you can share with other.
* Support multiselect icons.
* Support view and save subicon(s).
* Support save window status ,search option.
* Support save all icons, all selected icons to a location at once, added two save option:choice Overwrite, Auto Rename.
* Support multilingual interface.
* Support delete icons
* Support delete duplicate icons

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Icons for Technical Writers
$125 - LuckyIcon Art

A set of icons for writers of help files, software technical documentation, guides and user manuals.

LuckyIcon Art has developed (jointly with Baffled by Technology, an R&D spin-off of Nevada Learning Series - a company that has authored reference manuals for 225 software titles, published in 13 different languages, and sold 21 million guides worldwide) a set of icons that can significantly reduce the time needed for writing user manuals and software product help files

Using the Icons for Technical Writers set during the writing of documentation allows you to considerably reduce the number of program screenshots, facilitate the perception of given information to the maximum and simplify the process of studying for end users. The set contains icons that identify the most common user activities: pressing buttons, mouse-clicking, selecting menu items, switching between tabs, opening files, etc.

Visual perception of the icons has been thoroughly tested with a large group of target users. The most illustrative and intuitive icons were selected among the vast number of various possibilities.

All icons are available in EPS, TIFF, PNG and GIF formats suitable for use in publications, websites, PDF and CHM files.

The Icons for Technical Writers v1.0 details:
- 34 icons
- 32/24-bit and 256 color icons
- all icons in EPS, TIFF, PNG, and GIF formats
- 300 dpi icons suitable for printing publications
- 100x100, 24x24 and 16x16 pixel icons for PDF, HLP, and CHM files used in help systems and helpdesks

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Chameleon Icons
$49 - Softshape

Chameleon Icons converts images of any format into Windows icons with just a few clicks. Convert any picture or photo in BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, PSD, TIFF format into icons for your Windows desktop, applications, folders, email and ICQ contacts. As it supports Windows XP icons in 32-bit color depth with an alpha channel, you can easily create semi-transparent XP icons. Chameleon Icons is equipped with a rich frame styles collection.


2000 char. description.
Chameleon Icons converts images of any format into Windows icons. Any images that you find on the Internet you can convert to icons for use on your Windows desktop, in applications and anywhere else.

As it supports Windows XP icons in 32-bit color depth with an alpha channel, you can easily create semi-transparent XP icons. Now you can turn any image into an icon with just a few clicks.

Make your Windows folders different by assigning eye-catching icons to each of them. The simple Chameleon Icons interface makes it easy to make every folder look special.

Key features:
- Create Windows Icon with a single action
- Make cool e-mail shortcuts for your contacts using any photos
- Skin your folders - assign a fun icon to any folder
- Create unique AIM buddy icons and ICQ user shortcuts
- Get started quickly - easy user-friendly interface and Help get you going right away
- Chameleon Icons is equipped with a rich collection of frame styles including geometric, Document, ICQ User Shortcut, Skinned Folder, E-Mail Shortcut, Artistic and Nationals Flags.

Chameleon Icons: a great way to create icons using any picture or photo.

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IconPackager
$14.95 - Stardock Systems

The world's best, easiest way to change the icons on Microsoft Windows! IconPackager is a program that allows users to change nearly all of their Windows icons at once by applying "packages" of icons. A package of icons contains icons to replace most of the common icons on your Windows PC. What makes IconPackager special is that unlike Microsoft's themes which only change a few icons, IconPackager changes hundreds of icons. Everything from "My Computer", "Recycle Bin", Folders, all the way to specific file format icons such as .doc and .xls files and any other file type a user wishes to use.

Users visit websites such as WinCustomize.com and can download entire packages of icons created by either Stardock or IconPackager theme authors. Once loaded, the user can than apply these icons to their system to customize the look of Windows to their tastes. You don't have to rely on icon packages made by others either, creating your own icon packages is very easy. Once done, you can save your package for later use.

IconPackager also includes Icon Explorer. It is designed to make it easy to navigate through libraries of icons and view them easily in different sizes and formats so that you can get an idea of how an icon looks and decide if it's one you would want to use.

IconPackager 3.2 adds support for Windows Vista including the new "live folders" feature of Windows Vista making it the first (and only) program to support changing the new icons on Windows Vista.

IconPackager 3.2 also supports changing individual icons from a new "change icon" context menu for documents and most other files (EXE's can even have their icon changed from their properties dialog -- see this article for more details).

The shareware version of IconPackager can do all this and more. It runs on Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista. The enhanced registered version is only $14.95 (or can be purchased as part of Object Desktop, a suite of Stardock's desktop enhancements).

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