I felt almost stupid when we scheduled a review of Microangelo because, honestly, I thought just about everyone knew about this fine icon editing program. Indeed, I heard about it when I was surfing onto icon sites on the web one day.
   Then, within a day or so, I got three emails from readers asking us to recommend a good overall icon editor. I was a little surprised, but felt vindicated that we had actually decided to schedule this review.
   Microangelo does it all and makes it easy. It picks up images from the desktop, extracts icons from applications, creates icon libraries, has as neat an animated icon editor as I have seen, does cursors and – seemingly as a bonus – features an application called "engineer" which lets you fine-tune a lot of settings within Windows that you cannot otherwise get to (like setting the icons for the recycle bin).
   Given all that, it is as simple to use as any quality application we've encountered and, considering all its components, is a bargain to boot.

   Every grandparent in the world needs an icon of his or her grandchildren. We'll use mine to tell you how difficult it was to do this in Microangelo and, at the same time, demonstrate the power of the program.
   Of course we had the photograph of this adorable child on the computer (isn't she cute!), so we merely opened Photoshop and loaded the picture in. Then we opened Microangelo, set the default size of the icon we wanted to create to 48x48 and the color depth to 256 colors and clicked on that little camera icon you see in the screen shot above.
   We drew a square around the face, clicked the mouse, and were informed that the data had been saved to the clip board. We clicked on Edit/Paste, told Microangelo to scale the clip to the icon, and here we are. Total time, including loading Photoshop and Microangelo, 58 seconds.
   All that is left to do is save the icon. Nothing to it. Easy as pie. Which is one of the great things about Microangelo: it is very easy to use.
   To illustrate that, suppose we decided to make the green background on this icon transparent. Microangelo has, by far, the easiest transparent-setting we've encountered. Just lick a special "transparent" color (you can do the same for a "reverse" color if that is what you want to do) and then use the regular tools to paint in the transparency. Because so many of the pixels are the same shade of green, the Microangelo paint bucket tool is the one to use here. For those few pixels which are a different shade of green, the pencil tool cleans them up in a few seconds.
   Changing colors with which you want to work is another was to illustrate how easy Microangelo is to use. You click on the color you want to use with the eyedropper and, once you do, Microangelo changes your tool back to the one you were using. Saves a lot of clicks.
   You cannot find a better general-purpose icon and cursor editor than Microangelo.

   Link to the Microangelo web site.