In a prior post, I noted that PNG Utilities has been deprecated. It still works fine in REALbasic 2008 Release 4, but if you’re looking to replace it with something that is supported you have two (non-free) option: Monkeybread Plugins or Einhugur GraphicsFormats plugin

Switching to either of this is quite easy, but I thought it would be worth capturing how to do it in a post here.

This is a sample code for loading a toolbar icon using PNG Utilities:

Me.SaveToolButton.Icon = PNGu.GetPictureWithMask(save32)

This code is in the Open event of the toolbar.

MonkeyBread PNG Plugin

The entire MonkeyBread plugin suite costs about $320 and is worth every penny. If that’s too rich for you, then for about $30 you can just purchase the PNG plugin part which is what is used to replace PNG Utilities.

The code using the MonkeyBread PNG plugin looks like this:

Me.SaveToolButton.Icon = PNGStringToPictureMBS(save32, 0)

As you can see it is extremely similar. In addition, the MonkeyBread PNG plugin is about the same size (1.3MB) as the PNG Utilities plugin.

Einhugur GraphicsFormats

The Einhugur plugin suite contains several new controls for REALbasic in addition to the GraphicsFormats plugin which works with PNG and JPEG images. The entire suite costs $200 and it is also worth every penny.

The code using this plugin:

Dim PNGImp As New PngImporter
Me.SaveToolButton.Icon = PNGImp.OpenFromString(save32)

The GraphicsFormats plugin is bigger than PNG Utilities (5.7MB) so your executable will grow a bit.

Summary

As you can see, if you already have these two plugin suites, switching to them is quite easy. If you don’t already have them, then you probably ought to pick them up in general because they add so much power to REALbasic.

However, in the short term, I see no problem sticking with PNG Utilities.