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## About NewIcons

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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