N80 midlet icon problem revisited... questions

[kounapuu]

I've seen previous threads on this with no good answers. Has anyone made progress in making a good-looking midlet icon in the apps listing on the Nokia N80?

We have tried a slew of different png dimensions, square and not. Every time the same kind of distortion occurs, and it looks like bilinear interpolation mixed with a bit of poor dithering artifacts. No matter what icon size, they all look equally poor.

Currently the best result is with a 64x64 icon (because it uses the space available pretty well), but the quality of it is unacceptable, especially in comparison to the beautiful native Nokia icons.

We have seen some interesting things When running the Nokia J2ME icon tester (search for Using_Icons_in_MIDlets_v1_0_en.zip at Nokia Forum). It has a 64x64 icon selected by default when you install it. This icon is distorted in the app listing just like ours. Yet this is a Nokia app and Nokia icon! The interesting thing is when running the icon tester, you can see the 64x64 icon being used at the top of the screen in it's full glory, seemingly unmodified. This is also funny because in the Nokia Carbide.UI Tool for creating Symbian themes, it lists this top fullsize icon as being 60x60. Perhaps it's able to display 64x64 up there afterall. Regardless, it doesn't help us in making a nice looking app icon.

Does the N80 require different icon files to satisfy a proper midlet icon? The HUGE Carbide.UI tool has a plethora of features for making SIS packaged themes for the device that contain SVG files. That's great. But how does that help midlet icons? Can SVG or SIS files be stored in JAR files and used on installation? Also it doesn't help that a key needs to be generated for the SIS file.

What are Multi BMP files? People keep mentioning them. Can one be made containing different icon sizes, and it will be used out of the JAR?

Also about the SVG format and PNG's... Why do people keep suggesting putting the PNG into a SVG file anyhow? Would that stop it from being resized? Of course, scaling it contained in an SVG won't making the interpolation any better, come on SVG is a vector format.

Any stretching, warping, pixelation or degradation is unacceptable to our customer, we need to be dead-on with the icon dimensions and format to provide a beautiful icon. It looks silly to show them the midlet on the device with a poor icon compared to the beautiful Nokia icons.

[kounapuu]

Here's another interesting bit.

Through trial and error I found that going up to 88x88, the app icon looks like it has been resized with bilinear interpolation (hard edges, jaggies). But as soon as you go above 88, either 89x88 or 88x89, the interpolation looks like bicubic (softness, anti-aliasing).

What is the deal with that.

Funny enough, in the PDF doc inside Using_Icons_in_MIDlets_v1_0_en.zip they list 88x88 as the "MIDlet icon in the Screen status pane" for high-end S60, and not as the dimension for "MIDlet icon in Applications shell".