New Feed Wizard: Icon from URL

[akavel]

As a new user, I was (and still am) confused by the icons page in the Wizard. In my case, the app does not have embedded icon; however, it has a logo on its website; it would be super cool if I could paste the URL of the image and have it downloaded by the 0publish tool and added into the feed. (Or is it not how the icons work for feeds? as I say, I don't anderstand this well yet.)

[bastianeicher]

Hi @akavel,

the icons in feeds are used for two purposes:

• To show a icon when the feed is viewed in a browser (.png)
• To add an icon when creating Start Menu shortcuts (.ico)

The icons are not stored within the feed. Instead the feed just points to HTTP(S) URLs where the icons are hosted.

So you can indeed just paste the URL of the existing logo on the website. But you'll probably also need to upload an .ico file somewhere, if you want Zero Install to generate nice shortcuts.

I'll try to add more explanatory text to this page of the "New Feed Wizard". Thanks for your feedback!

Regards
Bastian

[akavel]

Maybe the .png & .ico files could be optionally copied into the same directory where the feed's .xml file is saved? (named the same as the feed, but replacing .xml with .png / .ico) Also, maybe some .NET library could be used to convert a .png image to an .ico one when only the first is provided?

[bastianeicher]

@akavel: Both good ideas. I'll but them on my backlog, but not sure when I'll get around to working on these.

[akavel]

FYI, I currently started using the following PowerShell script to convert .png images to .ico:

https://github.com/akavel/0catalog/blob/f1b8eb2d187d874024c8c87c3a590a42df03f06d/feeds/ConvertTo-Icon.ps1

maybe it can be useful to you in future for integration in 0publish-win?