Get a new coffee cup

Q: How do you change the steaming coffee cup icon that appears in the top left-hand corner of applets and frames?

A: In order to change the icon image on a frame — whether in an applet or an application — you must first create an Image object. There is more than one way to do this, but here we’ll use the ImageIcon object, since it has a simple constructor that takes a file name.

ImageIcon image = new ImageIcon("C:/images/your_image.gif");

One you have the ImageIcon, you call its getImage() method and pass it to your Frame‘s setIconImage() method.

Frame.setIconImage(image.getImage());

It’s worth mentioning that, since Swing’s JFrame class inherits from the AWT Frame class, the setIconImage() method is also available in JFrame. A complete JFrame example is included below:

import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import javax.swing.*;
public class AppIconFrame extends JFrame {
  public AppIconFrame() {
    enableEvents(AWTEvent.WINDOW_EVENT_MASK);
    initFrame();
  }
  //Frame initialization
  private void initFrame(){
    this.setSize(new Dimension(400, 300));
    this.setTitle("Custom Icon");
    ImageIcon image = new ImageIcon("c:yourpathyourfile.gif");
    this.setIconImage(image.getImage());
  }
  //Overridden so we can exit on System Close
  protected void processWindowEvent(WindowEvent e) {
    super.processWindowEvent(e);
    if(e.getID() == WindowEvent.WINDOW_CLOSING) {
      System.exit(0);
    }
  }
  public static void main(String[] args){
    AppIconFrame frame = new AppIconFrame();
     frame.setVisible(true);
  }
}