How to create a "transparent" BMP icon??

[zzyzxroad]

Hi there, I'm new. I've been making my own icons and branding for a while now. My icons aren't the best, but I like them. I would like to make icons that would have a "transparent" background. (I know BMP files can not do that).

I read somewhere that using the RGB color 255,0,255 (magenta) will be transparent, but have yet to be successful.

Does anyone know how to make a "transparent" icon?

[JmaCWQ]

What I do is make them transparent as .png's in Gimp, then use iPAC31x Image Explorer to save the png's to IGO compressed .bmp format.

[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

EDIT: I'm not sure if that will work for actual "icons" but it does work for any images in the data.zip & branding.zip etc. folders, made a few of the images used in data.zip & skins etc. on my own devices transparent that way & they've stayed transparent when converted to the IGO .bmp format.

[zzyzxroad]

Cool, thanks. I will try it out later and let you know my results.

*EDIT*

So I have everything working now. I'm using UPOI Editor to make my own branding. After the icon stripe is built, I import into GIMP and create my transparent PNG. Then I use iPAQ to convert it to the iGO BMP format. THEN I import it into the branding.zip.

Quite the workaround to get the results I want, but worth it.

Do you know how to make a sub-category for POIs? For example, Esso, Citgo, BP are all a sub category of "Petrol Station". I have imported my own POIs which show up in the main POI folder making a long list to scroll through. I would at least like to put them into a sub category of my own. If you don't, I will post a new topic.

[JmaCWQ]

Better late than never I guess, lol, missed your edit until now, and apologies if you've already got an answer in another thread.

I also use my own custom POI's as well as the Australian POI's that come with the map release content.
My custom ones I always have them running from the Save/Profiles/01 folder as a file called user.upoi, name them AA-mine-AA within the program, then when searching or looking through them all my custom ones appear in one group at the top of the search with the name AA-mine-AA so no scrolling required to find them.
Any new ones I create while out somewhere I put them in that same group at creation, easy to find later if needed.