Better recognizable icons in PB IDE toolbar for Win98

[Shardik]

Please compare the toolbar in Windows 98 of an older PB version with those of
PB 4.40 Beta 4. It is difficult to recognize the function of several icons in the
toolbar of the PB 4.40 IDE...

Classic theme in the PB 4.20 IDE running on Windows 98:


Classic theme in the PB 4.40 Beta 4 IDE running on Windows 98:


Silk theme in the PB 4.40 Beta 4 IDE running in Windows 98:


I think that this is a problem of the new alpha channel support in all GUI
elements which older versions of Windows don't support. In older versions
of Windows the alpha-channel image is converted to an icon with mask. Is
it possible to display the toolbar in the IDE running in Windows 98 without
alpha channel?

This brings a new “problem”. With Linux supporting the alpha-channel in every GUI element, the Windows version is lacking behind again because it still requires Icon files for some GUI things. That cannot stand! XP and Vista actually solve this quite well with their 32bit icon support so this wasn’t so hard to do. Older versions however don’t support that, so to get the best possible result an alpha-channel image is converted to an icon with a mask to get at least some transparency.

[Edwin Knoppert]

Therefore a company like Microsoft provides icon groups for nearly every graphic situation (an icon can contain multiple images, as intended, they differ resolution-wise).
I am personally also lazy to prepare different icons in my tools.

[freak]

Actually your picture looks like the generated icon masks are upside-down. I will have a look at that.

[freak]

fixed for the next beta.

[Shardik]

Wow Timo, that was fast. Thank you for fixing it. I should
have recognized it by myself looking at the backward and
forward buttons in the 4.40 Beta 4 classic theme to discover
that the icon masks are upside down.

I further experienced an IDE crash in Win98 when trying to
switch from classic to silk theme. The problem was that
PB 4.20 and PB 4.40 B4 used the same PureBasic.prefs in
the appdata folder (although not running concurrently).
After starting both IDEs with the /local switch accessing
the PureBasic.prefs in their respective installation folders
the theme switching in PB 4.40 B4 (with newly created
prefs) worked without problems.