TideSDKs App Icons Look Awful in Windows

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.