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 Icon Catcher 4
Whether you like the "bubbly" look or not, Windows XP certainly
brought a lot of changes to the Windows gui (graphical user interface). As
the computer becomes more of an entertainment device, it is important that
we have the best sound and picture. Microsoft tried to address this with new
features such as a
new Start Menu as well as 32-bit icons. There are 3rd party products that let
you change the entire look of Windows.
Windows has always had the ability to change icons, but with limited colour
support, I never felt it worth doing. Now with 32-bit icons, the variety and
quality of available icons are amazing. This is where Icon
Catcher 4 by Helexis
Software comes in. It lets you extract and save icons as well as work with
icon library files.
Testing
 The
program is very easy to use. You can search for all icons on your computer,
in a specific folder, or in a specific file. It searches for stand-alone ICO
(icon) files, icons within DLL
(dynamic link library) files and EXE
(executable) files. In the example on the left, I clicked the Find
in File... button
and choose EXPLORER.EXE file. The top-left pane shows all of the icons that
are in that file. There are 18 different ones in this file. I clicked on the
first icon (which is the standard icon for My Computer) and the right pane
shows all of the sizes and colour depths that are available. This particular
icon has the following sizes and colour depths:
16x16 (4-bit)
24x24 (4-bit)
32x32 (4-bit)
48x48 (4-bit) |
16x16 (8-bit)
24x24 (8-bit)
32x32 (8-bit)
48x48 (8-bit) |
16x16 (32-bit)
24x24 (32-bit)
32x32 (32-bit)
48x48 (32-bit) |
| 4-bit = 16 colours; 8-bit = 256 colours; 32-bit = 4294967296
colours |
Although not shown in this example, as I was testing I also came across icons
that were 96x96 in size with 32-bit colour depth. You can see that 32-bit icons
provide far more colour
and therefore far more detail.
So the question arises, why would I want to extract icons from files? Well,
you can extract icons and make your own desktop themes. You can use the icons
in programs such as chat programs. You could also use the icons on a web page.
When you find an icon that you want, you can choose to extract the icon as
either an ICO, GIF, or PNG file. You can also copy the image to the clipboard
to paste into another program.
You can also collect icons and save them in a library file. An Icon
Library (ICL) file is a standard format where you can save many icons in the same file.
In the past I had downloaded a few ICL files that contained a collection of
icons showing the logs of Major League Baseball teams. I never had a program
to open the icons with. I opened the library and all 30 logos showed up. I
can now extract any of the icons, or add/replace icons if I wish.
Icon Catcher 4 is straightforward to use, but does have a few options that
you can change if needed. You can change the following settings:
- what type of
drives the program scans for icons (local drives, network drivers, removable
media)
- choose
a program to use as an icon editor and launch it from within the program
- change export settings
- integrate the program with the Windows shell
- various logging and history options
Conclusions
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