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I thought that it was time for a blog post which is actually useful for other people. It seems that most people reach this site via search engines by searching for solutions to their problems.

So, if you are still looking for a good icon editor for Windows which supports alpha transparency and doesn't cost a cent, you should definitely take a look at IcoFX. I've been using this program for some years now and I'm very happy with it.

I can't say much about the editing features such as brushes, pencils and the like because there is one particular feature of IcoFX which makes all these tool useless: PNG import.

That's right. You can simply create your icon in your favorite graphics editing software, save it in PNG format with full alpha transparency and import it into IcoFX.

You can then either use the import feature to import more graphics in different resolutions and different color depths into the same icon file or you can use the editor's built-in convert functionality to create new "sub-icons" from already existing icons.

IcoFX can also export icons as BMP, JPEG, PNG, GIF or JPEG2000 and extract icons from DLL files like shell32.dll or EXE files.

The built-in resource editor allows it to replace icons in program files.

What are you waiting for? Go, get it.

Related Link: IcoFX - The Free Icon Editor

I'm in the process of bringing my MyMiniCity Dynamic Signature script to SourceForge. While creating the download archives, I came across a very simple and yet very interesting question:

How do I create a ".tar.gz" file using 7-Zip on Windows?

On Linux, I would simply run:

tar cfz archive.tar.gz folder

When using 7-Zip on Windows, this process is a little bit more complicated.

As a GZIP compressed archive can contain only one file, 7-Zip won't offer you GZIP compression if you try to compress a folder or multiple files at once. When you choose TAR, you can't select any compression algorithm.

The trick is, that you have to create a TAR archive first. You can then put that single TAR file into 7-Zip and it will finally offer you the ability to compress that file using GZIP.

The result is an archive with the .tar.gz extension which is exactly what you wanted to do.

That's another example how something that needs several mouse clicks on Windows needs a single line on a Linux shell.