I don't like the Bootstrap icons because of not containing the abbreviation of the application. A symbol with arrows, a ball pen or a pencil symbol has no relation to a specific application.

I favor the round icons with UE, UES, UF, UC, UFTP with the additional black border. The black border is good on light background (white or light gray).

It would be even better in my opinion if UE and UES in yellow circle with black border would be completely black without an lightning or shading effect, please see the attached images below.

Collection of icons with black UE and UES with true colors (6965 colors)

Collection of icons with black UE and UES with just 254 colors

The second one with just 254 colors for all the symbols demonstrate that it is not necessary to have the icons in the executables and DLLs in true color. Palette based icons with 256 colors could be used too. That would reduce the size of the icons in the executables and libraries saving disk space and RAM on application running. The image with the 254 colors was created by using in my favorite image editor the command to reduce the colors to 256 with using the error diffusion reduction method which is usually the best for true color symbols with several thousands colors to just 256 colors (or less). Does anybody see the differences between the true color image with 6965 colors and the 254 colors image?

The round UES icon could have a lightning effect on yellow background to bottom right "corner" as the UE icon has to top left "corner". That would look most likely better than the darkening effect to bottom right and would help to distinguish between UE and UES icon.

The file association icons for UltraEdit and UEStudio are best with a blank white or yellow sheet with black border (for light theme) and around the black border a white border (for dark theme) and inside either the round UE and UES icon (256 colors) or there is inside the sheet just the abbreviation UE or UES in black (two color with white sheet or sixteen colors with yellow sheet). But I like for file associations also the square logos with rounded corner (phone style icons)  with the application abbreviation. They are very simple which is good for file association icons as these icons are on most Windows computers displayed quite small (16 x 16 or 24 x 24 or 32 x 32 depending on the DPI setting) in Windows File Explorer. The larger file association icons are displayed usually only on file being stored in one of the two desktop directories on the user's desktop or there is on the user's desktop a shortcut to a file of which file type is associated with UE or UES.

UltraFTP could be abbreviated also with UT instead of UFTP because of UFTP is too long for the small icons like 16 x 16 or 24 x 24. The larger icons of UltraFTP could have the abbreviation UFTP although I think UT would be also okay for the larger icons.

@tsmith35 Many years ago I bought a big box of Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8 with a CD and two books which is still used by me for image editing. PSP8 offers three color reduction methods: similar colors usually best for photos, ordered dither which is just for a palette with standard colors, and error diffusion usually best for drawn images with lightning and shading and anti-alias effects.

A Portable Network Graphics (PNG) image looks identical on all platforms independent on color type and bits per channel as a lossless compression method is used for the PNG image format. The referenced Wikipedia article has a table showing how much bits are needed per pixel depending on color type and bits per channel. A PNG with an index color palette with 256 colors needs 768 bytes for the RGB values of the 256 colors in the palette and one byte per pixel for the palette index. The raw data are additionally compressed using a lossless compression. There are special tools for PNG images which can produce smaller PNG files by changing the parameters of the compression algorithm like block split threshold and arrange the colors in the palette not according to their RGB values, but in an order resulting in an indexing of the pixels being best for the compression. I use free command line version of PNGOUT for PNG file size optimization.

An ICO file respectively an ICO resource in a Windows executable or a Windows library is usually a collection of an image in multiple sizes in either BMP (uncompressed) or PNG (compressed) image format. All sizes of an image can have the same color depth but it is also possible to use different color depths. The sizes 16 x 16 and 24 x 24 are so much smaller in comparison to larger sizes like 96 x 96 or 128 x 128 that it is often enough using just 16 colors in a palette for the small sizes reducing the number of bits per pixel to just four making storage size of small images even smaller. Well, the usage of an indexed PNG image in an ICO resource or ICO file makes more sense for the larger sizes as that reduces file size in KB and not in range of just some bytes. Example: An image with 96 x 96 pixels with RGB value for each pixel requires 96 × 96 × 3 bytes = 27648 bytes on raw data (without header and transparency) while the same image with a 256 color palette requires 256 × 3 + 96 × 96 × 1 = 9984 bytes on raw data.

Mofi wrote: ↑

Sep 10, 2023

Many years ago I bought a big box of Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8 with a CD and two books which is still used by me for image editing. PSP8 offers three color reduction methods: similar colors usually best for photos, ordered dither which is just for a palette with standard colors, and error diffusion usually best for drawn images with lightning and shading and anti-alias effects.

I wanted first to thank you and IDM for listening  - I was literally holding off updating several machines while that ugly icon was still haunting me... all better... but the quote

I just wanted to say I so very much Loved PSP - I always found it way more intuitive to use than PhotoShop even if PS had more features - not being an art person first and just needing a tool that got out of my way to let me edit the stuff I needed in images.

In many ways, PSP was my image version of UltraEdit - except of course it long since got gobbled up by bigger companies and kind of died

These days I use ACDSee when I don't want to muss about with the full feature set of PhotoShop (or frankly pay for a continuing eternal subscription model for software)

Amazed PSP8 still runs on todays machines TBH - a real credit to JASC - may they have landed softly wherever those folks went off to