This extended icon format introduced in OS 3.5 duplicates and obsoletes
the features previously provided by the third party NewIcons patch. Unlike
NewIcons, the V44 color mapped icons do not encode the image data in the
icon tooltypes, so the new icon format is both faster and more compact.
The newicon.library
V40 can still load V44 icons and decode the
NewIcon images encoded in the tooltypes, but it can't access the new
V44 palette mapped images.
The V44 Workbench has compatibility code to decode NewIcons using
the newicon.library
, therefore it is no longer necessary to
start the `C:NewIcon' program from the `Startup-Sequence'
(2). This feature is active by default, but it can be switched
off using the Workbench preferences editor.
Once the migration to the new color mapped icon format will be complete,
future versions of the Workbench will drop NewIcon compatibility.
A future version of newicon.library
could be enhanced to read the
V44 image data as well as the original NewIcons format to support old
applications that have not been updated to the new V44 API. As of this
writing, such version of the newicon.library
is not yet available.
The choice of using a different scheme for palette mapped images
instead of conforming to the de-facto standard set by NewIcons was
necessary because the newicon.library
API had a number of
limitations and inconsistencies which couldn't be worked around
straightforwardly. Programmers are therefore urged to adapt their
applications to the new icon.library
API as soon as possible.
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