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My app icon is a 512x512 icon that looks great and scales nicely on OS X. On Windows, however, the icon that gets added to the desktop looks awful (ragged edges, mostly) at Medium and Large settings. It looks fine small. The notification tray icon looks similarly awful.

Has anyone else noticed something similar? I haven't found anything to indicate that I should be packaged multiple icons of different sizes or anything else to that effect. Would really love some input if anyone has any thoughts.

Rob Wilkerson
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  • Usually you should include icons in the sizes 16×16, 24×24, 32×32, 48×48 and 256×256. The format of an icon resource on Windows can accommodate multiple sizes and colour depths easily. – Joey Feb 05 '14 at 20:46
  • I considered that, so I looked around to see how I might do that so that Tide would recognize them, but couldn't find anything. Thanks. – Rob Wilkerson Feb 05 '14 at 20:51
  • It is a problem with the project's own icon as well, tidesdk.ico. Everything up to 128x128 looks good, the 256x256 icon is pretty screwed up with the colors all wrong. There are more hints in win32_app.py, it requires ImageMagick to be installed, only considers 32x32 through 128x128, rescales and runs a utility named ReplaceVistaIcon.exe. A //todo item. – Hans Passant Feb 05 '14 at 22:39
  • Wow. Thanks for really digging in, Hans. I appreciate all of the information. If you'll make this comment an answer, I'll mark it as such. If this is all the app does, then it's not surprising that the icons look so bad. – Rob Wilkerson Feb 05 '14 at 23:02

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For anyone experiencing the same issue, here's what I found and how I fixed things...

Originally, I was running the Tide build process specifying a 512x512 PNG file as the app icon. This is fine on OSX, but Windows requires some special handling. Actual .ico files must be created. The Tide build script for Windows is happy to do that for you. It took my 512x512 PNG, created icons of various sizes and packaged them up in a single .ico application icon.

The problem is that it didn't create enough size variants. Specifically, it creates 16, 32, 64, 128 pixel variants. That doesn't cover all of the places Windows - especially Win7 - wants to use them so it scales what it has. Badly.

Instead, I ran my 512x512 PNG through the ICO Converter utility, selected all sizes at 32 bit depth and saved the converted icons in my Resources/ root as app.ico.

With the file in place, I just changed the <icon> element in tiapp.xml accordingly:

<icon>app.ico</icon>

Maybe this will help someone else.

Rob Wilkerson
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