Make New Icons for Windows Vista!

Previous versions of icon editors don’t support Vista Icons? Experts from Aha-Soft have found new guidelines for solving this problem

Aha-Soft today announces the unveiling of ArtIcons Pro 5.0, the newest version of its award winning icon design software for the Windows OS. This version, aside from rendering its assistance in creating, editing icon images and managing icon files and libraries, provides great opportunities for working with Vista Icons. If you couldn’t work with Vista Icons previously, now with the new version of ArtIcons Pro it is going to be no trouble at all. From now onwards 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 Pro 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 Pro 5.0 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.

Previous versions of the program have managed to hand on all their eminent features to the new version: ArtIcons Pro 5.0 is equipped with all essential drawing tools including various kinds of airbrushes, pencils and paintbrushes as well as miscellaneous text, line and shape tools. The software also offers a variety of solid, patterned and gradient flood fills, drop shadow, smooth, color modification and other effects. The program features easy converting from one image format into another.

ArtIcons Pro 5.0 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 Visa Icons crafted by ArtIcons Pro 5.0 will strongly impact users’ overall impression of your programs’ visual design. ArtIcons Pro will improve the usability of your software by making programs, objects, and actions easier to identify and find.

ArtIcons Pro 5.0 Benefits at a Glance:
• Vista Aero-style Icons support;
• PNG format to compress high-resolution images without losses;
• Saving Vista Icons without compression provides compatibility with XP;
• Find and extract, edit, import and export icons and manage icon libraries;
• Lot’s of delicate power instruments for creating and editing icons;
• Import and export ICO, CUR, BMP, JPG, PNG, PSD, etc. images;
• Multilanguage support.

Pricing and Availability
ArtIcons Pro 5.0 runs under Windows 95/98/ME/2000/NT/XP/2003 and costs $39.95 (USD) for a single user license. Registered customers are entitled to lifetime technical support and discounts on further updates. Additional information on ArtIcons Pro, as well as its 30-day evaluation version with nag screens is available from http://www.aha-soft.com.

About Aha-Soft
This privately owned company was founded in 2000 and is off to a phenomenal start, receiving high praise in its first years of operation from top Internet download sites including ZDNet, TuCows and Simply the Best. Based in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, Aha-Soft manufactures advanced image processing software for professional and amateur graphic artists. Aha-Soft’s line of icon and cursor tools features innovative software designs to set new standards. For more information, please visit http://www.aha-soft.com.

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AN EVALUATION COPY IS AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

Product page link: http://www.aha-soft.com/articons/index.htm
Download link: http://aha-soft.com/ articons/aipro.exe (1.5Mb)
Company website: http://www.aha-soft.com