wxWidgets & Translucency

[schullo]

Hi,

I wonder, whether it is possible to use the wxWidget-GUI-Framework with translucent industrial icons (mostly in PNG-format) like they are sold by www.iconexperience.com or www.icongalore.com. Has anyone tried this out already? (I don't want to spend all the money to buy commercial icon-collections, just to find out they won't work with wxWidgets afterwards...)

So what it boils down to is: do the wxWidgets have support for PNG-files with alpha-channel? If not, is this feature planned for the near future?

Thx for any helpful suggestions and advice on this matter,
Hans-Joerg Schulz
University of Rostock, Computer Science Department

[arkanes]

I haven't done any work with PNG but I believe that alpha is supported with recent versions of wx. There may be some gotchas. I suggest getting some public domain or otherwise freely available PNG graphics (http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/png-sitemap.html#images/) and testing with those.

[NinjaNL]

I don't want to spend all the money to buy commercial icon-collections, just to find out they won't work with wxWidgets afterwards...

There are plenty of free icon collections available, or gpl, or some such license.

I quite like http://jimmac.musichall.cz/openoffice-icons.php or http://www.iconarchive.com/ or http://www.topicons.com/

I have a collection from the web somewhere that I like the look of.

Why not take a look at these first, all it costs is a little time.

[schullo]

Hi again,

well, the freebie-icons might work for you, but in most cases it is rather unclear, whether they are under LGPL or otherwise allowed to be included in closed-source software. So in fact only the last link you posted states explicitly, that the icons are under LGPL. This is of major concern to me, and therefore I considered to buy a commercial icon-collection to be on the safe side.

In addition, most free icon-collections lack a certain seriousness, which means that they include all kinds of smilies and homer simpsons and stuff, which is useless for serious application development.

Best regards,
hans-Joerg Schulz

[NinjaNL]

In addition, most free icon-collections lack a certain seriousness, which means that they include all kinds of smilies and homer simpsons and stuff, which is useless for serious application development.

I cannot disagree there, although there are "serious" free icon sets if you look for them, as well as several who would be happy with a mention on your about box (Icons created by Joe Bloggs) but you would have to spend some time searching them out. As I stated the last link is a set that I quite like.

[leio]

I believe the whole point of what arkanes said, is to use those free, GPLed or LGPLed or whatever icons with alpha channels to _test_ how they work with wx. So you can know with confidence that you can buy those commercial ones.