Happy new year everyone. As mentioned in this previous post, we have been looking into whether customers would like to see us provide XAML icons. Right now we offer a very high quality raster icons product (Actipro Icons). This XAML Icons product would be similar however the icons would be DrawingImage-based so that they could easily be used anywhere in WPF that has an ImageSource property.
You’d simply do something like this to use an icon (assuming “Paste32” is a key for one of our DrawingImages that has been exported into your application):
<Image Width=”32” Height=”32” Scale=”Uniform” Source=”{StaticResource Paste32}” />
The Actipro XAML Icon Browser
Without further ado, I’d like to present the icon browser application we’ve put together to view the icons and export them for usage.
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The Icon Browser showing a variation of the sample Paste icon that is designed to look best around 256x256 size
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The browser is really easy to use. On the left you select the Target Size. There are 7 size options, meaning we’ve designed 7 variations of each icon, where each variation is meant to be used at or close to the selected target size. Target sizes range from 16x16 up through 256x256.
When a target size is selected all the available icons in that size are displayed in the list on the right. Please note that the sampler only contains the 7 Paste icon variations. More icons will be included in the Sampler if we do decide to pursue this product.
You can use sliders to scale and rotate the icons. This really shows off how good they continue to look, even when animation effects have been applied.
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The Paste icon designed to look best around 32x32 size, scaled up to 400% size and rotated 17 degrees
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When you are ready to export icons for usage in your application, just select the icons to export in the list. Then click the Export Selected button. This exports them all to a file that you designate. The file contains a ResourceDictionary so you simply add it to your own application, merge in the ResourceDictionary with your Application.Resources and you are good to go.
From that point on you reference the icons by their key name, using StaticResource as mentioned above.
Download the Sampler and send us your comments
We’d appreciate it if you could download the free sampler and let us know what you think, both about the icon quality as well as the Icon Browser application. Please post comments here or email them over.
Download the beta version of the Sampler now
Thanks for your assistance! Whether we pursue this product or not will be based on your feedback.