Nice Round Title Bar Icons?

[Mark Newton]

Hi all,

I suspect that the answer's going to be more complicated than I was hoping for, but...

For an application I'm writing, I need (would like) to use a round logo as the icon in the title bar and taskbar (on Windows), but keep things platform independent. When I use a 16x16 PNG with transparency and set it with Frame.setIconImage(), the image is very pixelated, and not nice, which my graphic designer says is because it's not being displayed as a 32-bit image, but instead as 256 colour (so the transparency is either on or off, not variable - as far as I can understand). In graphics applications, the image looks fine. Also, if I use Alt-Tab, the image is enlarged and even more pixelated and nasty.

So, my question is - can I use some other format (like ICO on Windows) to give the Frame an image with multiple sizes, and/or make it use varying transparency to draw the circle properly? It's obviously possible, because plenty of other applications use it - perhaps I need to use SWT or something? (I'd prefer to keep it as Swing-based as possible, though).

Any help or suggestions gratefully received!