Tech Note 09: Creating Launcher Icons

September 08, 2008

Copyright 2008 NS BASIC Corporation

Introduction

S60 and UIQ devices each use completely different methods to produce icons. This Tech Note walks you through the steps of producing icons for each platform.

The pathnames to your icons are set up in the Project Properties of your app. If you do not specify an icon, NS Basic/Symbian OS will use a generic one. If you do not see the new icon when you install an update of your app, try turning the phone off and on.

Here is how to create the icon files:

S60 Icons

S60 device icons are in a proprietary format called MIF (Multi Icon Format). It's a very efficient format, but not easy to make. MIF files can only be created from SVG-T (Scaled Vector Graphics - Tiny) files. This conversion is built into NS Basic/Symbian OS, but you need to produce the SVG-T file somehow. There are 3 ways to do this:

  1. The easiest way is to buy Adobe Illustrator to draw icons and save in SVG-Tiny format. It's expensive ($599 USD!) but it will save you a lot of time. It includes a feature that will convert a photo to an SVG line drawing with color fills.
  2. You can download a free editor named Inkscape. Inkscape saves to SVG format but not SVG-T. Nokia has a utility to convert to SVG-T, but only a subset of the full SVG format is supported. Start with a very simple image such as a box, then build up from there. Pasting a BMP into InkScape does not work, but saving an eps as a .pdf, then importing it into InkScape works.

    To convert the SVG file to SVG-T, use the SVGBinEncode.exe utility, installed as part of the S60 SDK (455 megs, downloadable from the Nokia web site). The file extension should be .svg, not .svgt.

    There is also a free web based utility to convert jpg to svg files.

  3. You can type an SVG file into a text editor. It's XML syntax. This is probably only useful for trivial cases.
Once you have the SVG-T file, enter it into the Launcher Icon field in your Project Properties. It's best to size your icon at 44x44 pixels for proper scaling.

If the device does not show your new icon after installation, turn the device off and on. The icons get cached, so a changed icon will not appear automatically.

UIQ Icons

UIQ also has their own format, called MBM (Multi Bit Map). The icons are created from standard Windows .bmp files. The icons must be provided in 3 sizes: 18x18, 40x40 and 64x64. Icons should be in 8 bit color format.

Name the bitmaps Filename18.bmp, Filename40.bmp and Filename64.bmp. In Project Properties, enter Filename.bmp, without the bitmap size.