Icon Creation
How do I create an icon for my program?
The icon for a Palm app is a 22x22 pixel bitmap. You can actually use a 32x32 bitmap, but it gets clipped to the top-center 22x22 pixels. On all but the color Palm devices, the icon needs to be a 1-bit (black and white) image. Grayscale devices can interpret 2 or 4-bit icons. On the color devices, you can use an 8-bit bitmap. On OS 5 devices, you may use a 44x44 pixel bitmap with 16-bit color (and if your program is to be publically released, you should, otherwise your icon is going to stand out as kind of an eyesore in the launcher). Palm OS 5 seems to allow very wide icons, but you probably shouldn't make them bigger than the standard size. You can also include one of each, and let the launcher pick the right one depending on the device's capabilities. If you make a Palm OS 5-style high resolution icon for a program that can run on older OS versions, be sure to include a normal low-res version as well, or older devices will just show the standard "stylus tapping a circle" icon (I have also heard of some Palm-based devices crashing when confronted with this situation).
You may want to make another icon resource containing 8x8 icon(s) that will show up when the launcher view mode is set to List (though hardly anybody ever uses this mode as far as I know).
When your program has been built into a PRC, all the icon bitmaps will be put into a single resource of type "tAIB". Quartus RsrcEdit? lets you edit 1, 2, 4, or 8-bit icons (as well as many other resource types) right on your Palm.
The NSBasic website has some interesting notes on the maximum size of icons, as well as a free font you can use in your icons if they must contain text.
- All of the development systems except CodeWarrior use ordinary Windows bitmaps (BMP files) for icons. There are many BMP editors out there; Windows comes with a basic one called Paint, or you can get a shareware program that will be easier to use.
- Metrowerks Software's CodeWarrior has it's own resource editor, and its own resource format; there is no separate BMP file holding the icon image. You can either create your icon within Constructor, or you can cut and paste an image in from a regular paint program.
- If you're running under Unix/Linux you can get the Palm Icon Editor from Darrin Massena's Palm Development Tools and Articles page. The PRC-tools package also comes with txt2bitm, which takes a text file containing a 32x32 square of '-'s and '#'s, and makes a BMP file out of it. You can also get PPM2BMP which converts PPMs to a BMP file bitmaps and back. You can find a link to it and other Unix stuff at the Palm stuff from the ISAAC Group.