Animations For Windows Applications

Question

Where can I find standard (licence free) animations like "Copy" for self implemented windows applications (avi,animated gif)? Visual Studio has only few animations in its image library (unfortunately not the "Copy" animation).

Answer 1

I'd recommend you download Resource Hacker and look for the desired resource in the C:\\Windows\\System32\\shell32.dll file.
Look under the AVI section for the common AVIs used by windows.

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Alternatively, if you have Visual Studio 2008 installed, look through the Visual Studio Image Library . There is a copy animation in there albeit it isn't the same as the one windows displays when a copy is in progress.

The VS image library can be found at %ProgramFiles%\\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\\Common7\\VS2008ImageLibrary

Answer 2

There are a few icon packs available through the Extension Manager in Visual Studio 2010, just search for "icon" in the Online Gallery. Not sure whether there are animated icons for the Copy operation, though.

Answer 3

On WindowsXP, some of the animations can be found in the shell32.dll, you'll need to grab each one and see what it is as they only have resource IDs for them. However, there is no documented API to access these resources and just opening shell32.dll and reading the resource is not recommended, nor can it be assumed what the format of the resource is , see this article by Raymond Chen about this issue.

Technically, you could just extract the animation using a resource editor and add the animation to your application. However, there is almost certainly a copyright / licensing issue here - copying the resources and adding them to your application is certainly copyright infringement, and reading the resource from system32.dll to use in your application might be breaking the EULA. IANAL, so seek advice if this is for a non-personal project.