To be honest I classed the posting of this thread as the start of the challenge (note that I used the word challenge instead of competition because I think most of us will find this so challenging that we'll just be glad to get something working irrespective of the competition
)
But to answer your questions and put as much 'meat on the bone' as possible...
Target is both the desktop and device, although the device is more favourable as it was a question relating to icon editors on the device that started all of this off.
Icon Sizes 16x16 and 32x32 only with up to 256 colours.
File type, must be .ico but if you can work out how to include .dll or .exe then these can also be included.
The primal functions I had in mind were, create new, load, edit, save and saveas.
Graphical functions... As many as you like - I didn't realise how hard it was to create many of these and at present only have a simple pen option but hope to expand on this.
Dll's, why not although this could be deemed as an unfair advantage but if you have the know how them why not use it
The difficulty I think is set high enough just trying to get something that will work. The more features you want to add the harder it obviously gets.
I'm sure that once you get started you'll soon discover just how tricky this application really is. I was struggling just to get a grid to create the icon on and then to extract the design from.
Start date is NOW...
End date is end of September (If that's OK with everyone else - although I think that there's only myself that's actually having a go at it, but Erel has suggested that he may come up with something
)
Regards,
RandomCoder