I've recently exposed one of our users to IconDeveloper a, new application made by splitting icon tools we initially planned to put in SkinStudio. The whole idea behind IconDeveloper is to "Give the Caesar what Caesar's and give God what's God's". IconDeveloper makes a quite untypical icon creation tool. It does not aspire to be a fully blown standalone drawing program, instead, as SkinStudio, it uses a third party image editor to edit the images. What I've heard from this user has the potential to be the biggest misconception of IconDeveloper. Basically it comes down to "If it can't edit the graphics that makes the icons it's not a creativity tool but merely an assembly tool". I understand his concern. Initially I thought exactly the same. But truly, what makes a program a creativity tool? Is a paintbrush tool enough or does it needs to paint rectangles and circles? Will regular circles do or does it have to have them antialiased? We cannot afford to make an image editor that could compete with Photoshop. We do not have the resources to do it, but even if we did, Artists (as I perceive icon authors to be) are used to an image editor of their choice. They use e.g. Photoshop and want to keep using it. Why make them learn another program? Perhaps they prefer Paint Shop Pro, some of them may not even have gone beyond MS Paint (ok I exaggerate but you get the idea), why add to the pain?

I have been talking to professional Artists (and icon creators) before I started working on this and you know what? They don't give a heck about the painting tools built into icon editors. No matter how hard will the icon editor authors strive they are not going to make it work for the Artists. So the icon editor has antialiased lines? Pfft... Photoshop does them better! Oh, so the other icon editor draws nice effects and transformations? But of course... Photoshop has plenty of those.

Get the idea? Make the icon editor do what it should do.

So what should an icon editor do? Let's see what an icon editor can add what all those grand graphics companies have not done for our Artists.

• 1) It is important that the resampling algorithm be suited for icons. The big image editors are not well suited for resizing images of that magnitude. Resize a 600dpi photo in any of the major editors is not any challenge, but try doing the same to the 16x16 icon even with use of their resampling. The big ones optimize for speed and for a very good reason. They operate on huge images and those also require different algorithms. Perhaps offer the Artist a few algorithms to choose.
  
  
• 2) Create multiple formats with ease and grace. Once the Artist has an image (e.g. 512x512 pixels) he/she wants to just take it to the icon editor to make all the sub-formats for him/her in a few clicks. This of course requires the above mentioned well suited resampling.
  
  
• 3) Make it easy to create icon sets out of multiple images. Batch processing is really important for Artists. Once they have created their art in the big editors they want it to be painlessly converted to icons. This includes mass creation of the multiple formats out of each image.
  
  
• 4) make applying modifications they make to all frames at a time. Modifications like re-coloring, perhaps rotation?
  
  
• 5) make it apply various modifications theme wide. Like allow re-coloring of many icons at once.
  
  
• 6) make it support all the image editors easily. Actually what some of Artists mentioned as being useful in one of the other icon editors was that they can import a layer from Photoshop directly to the editor with use of a plugin. Cool! But why Photoshop, why Paint Shop Pro users will not be able to do it that way? Why not go a step further? Why not allow the image editor to edit the very sub-images, it will do it better then I (or any icon editor) could ever do it and then use the icon manipulating program to assemble all the images back into an icon? That's the path I have taken.
  
  
• 7) make it easy to extract the images that make the icons to a number of popular formats like BMP, PNG, TGA, JPG and if the icon supports alpha channel (smooth transparency) export it as well
  
  
• 8) make it possible to create icon libraries and operate on them in terms of adding, deleting, re-coloring
  
  
• 9) it should be relatively cheap. How can you achieve this? If you cut off the painting tools and focus on what you should really do it may eventually work. After all why something as trivial (ok it's not trivial but relatively simple in comparison to fully blown image editor) as an icon creator should cost half of the big brother image editor or more? Paint Shop Pro currently costs $84 while icon editors featuring all the above mentioned functions cost no less then about $35. But if you really want all the features mentioned above you will need to buy the Professional version for about $59 (and only one editor currently allows Photoshop integration). Isn't that a waste if you already have spent $84 for an image editor that can do all those things (and it can do them much better)?
  
  

So what comes out of it all? Icon development tools should not try to do things they are never going to be good enough at. Even if they were, what would make us thing Icon authors would even be willing to do the switch? Artists are skilled in graphics, not just making icons, so it's most probable they already have their image editing software of choice. They already know tools like Photoshop, Corel Photopaint or Paint Shop Pro. They got used to their tools and I think they may prefer their tools to cooperate, not compete. They need something that makes it possible to use their talents and habits to make the final effect possible and as painless as it could be. In that light a true creativity tool would be one that does not slow them down in their effort and allows them to concentrate on the things they do best - create their beauty. The tool we are about to present very soon will make that all possible.

How will IconDeveloper work? While opening an icon it will extract all the sub-images in a temporary folder and whenever the user requests to edit them it will call the image editor the user have chosen to do it (it is possible for the user to define any number of image editors). Any saved change in the image file (while edited by the chosen image editor) will be reflected immediately in the IconDeveloper, so the user will be able to track the changes he/she has made to the sub-image and check e.g. how the smooth transparency look on various backgrounds - that's something that most image editors don't do or make it so painful to change that Artists just do not do it too frequently.

Big "Thanks!" to GreenReaper (Laurence Parry) for proofing the article for me.