okay beside of that the best would be if you could just provide a texture and that unity itself builds the icon (hint for 1.6 ;O) i wanted to ask how you guys create icons for your applications on osx.
Till now i dug out different stuff like on this site InterfaceLIFT: Icon Software for Mac OS X and went the route that i used the trial photoshop filter from KineticCreations to create an icon file out of my image and afterwards used micon to apply it to the application.
This worked beside of that i’m not fond of paying $20 for just saving an icon. Is there any other free icon exporter photoshop-plugin on the mac or another little tool?
I’m fond of Iconographer (makes Windows icons too), but here’s a free method that doesn’t need the Apple dev tools. (But if you want just ONE thing from the dev tools, you can extract it from the DVD with Pacifist–search versiontracker.com for it.)
Save your creation as a TIFF. No layers, no compression, but do Save Transparency (checkbox in the options that appear after picking a name and clicking Save). Recommended size: 256x256 or 512x512 (because higher-res icons are on the way with Leopard) but you can save as 128x128 for now.
Various shareware apps can make an icon from there, but for free just open Terminal and type tiff2icns followed by a space. Then drag your TIFF file into the Terminal window. Press return in Terminal and an OS X .icns file will be created–even including a 32x32 OS 9 version. (Or, use an app like Iconographer.)
Launch Icns2Rsrc ( http://versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/11781 ) and then Open the .icns from the File menu, to create a “rsrc” icon which you can simply copy and paste anywhere, using the Finder.
Select the .rsrc file in the Finder–no need to Get Info first–and Copy. Then Get Info on the file you want to change, select the icon at top left, and Paste. (Open the “Preview” pane of the Get Info window to view the icon at full size/quality.)
By the way a support of 512^2 texture in leopard for just an icon will be a killer for a lot of the mac graphics cards. Will they downscale them before usage if memory is short? We will see…
I hope that at some certain point we will see 3d objects in place of 2d images. The concept of the osx dock for instance is so many years old and there were lot’s docks versions with submenus already running on the ancient amiga. Time for at least a little bit of futher evolution…
I think they’ll be downscaled in practice simply because almost nobody will bother using them that large–much like we have 128x128 icons now, but seldom display them that large.
I think the bigger icons are future-proofing for high-res displays, and maybe also partly for large-UI apps like Front Row.
I think the best will always be a mix of vector and high-quality bitmaps (which OS X scales very nicely).
Vector art can do a lot, but it can’t recreate the photographic detail that some icons have (like the ones for Preview and GarageBand when viewed large). Not without rendering an incredible number of vectors and gradients, which would likely be slower than a GPU-driven bitmap.
By the way, I was interested to note that OS X 10.4 already has some vector elements you might not even know are there. When you enable the developer-only (for now) resolution-independent OS X interface, you find some buttons that scale larger perfectly smoothly. At normal size they look just like any other oval button, gradient and all, but when enlarged, they stay smooth and sharp the way most elements don’t. This suggests to me that some Apple apps are already starting to use vector button graphics in preparation for future practices.
I vaguely recall the “More Info” button in Finder’s Column View being an example. But I don’t see why aqua/glassy buttons couldn’t be done with a few gradients too.
It’s nice to see all this hidden in Tiger, because it suggests that they’ll be ready for the public with Leopard.
I think the best will always be a mix of vector and high-quality bitmaps (which OS X scales very nicely).
Vector art can do a lot, but it can’t recreate the photographic detail that some icons have (like the ones for Preview and GarageBand when viewed large). Not without rendering an incredible number of vectors and gradients, which would likely be slower than a GPU-driven bitmap.<<<
Yes i know what you mean and i partly agree but it’s not really necessary as
a) it depends a lot on the style you choose.
b) You could also come up with enhanced procedural filling methods/shader effects for instance in order to fill certain parts in your image to get it more detailed. You could also animate them nicely by this.The effects could be precalculated or done on the fly.
It’s nice to see all this hidden in Tiger, because it suggests that they’ll be ready for the public with Leopard.<<<
It’s nice not to have limits on your icons’ visual style, though. Also, it’s nice to be able to use any creative source or imagery to draw upon, not just vector sources. And for many kinds of image, bitmap creation is much quicker and easier than vector art.
I think bitmaps should stay in the mix for those reasons–and also because some images don’t need to be enlarged infinitely with sharp detail, in which case a bitmap can be a good-performing solution without the blurry/blocky drawback.
It would be neat if Apple released a vector tool with bitmap-fills like you describe, ready to make icons and buttons.
but Iconographer can’t do the iconchange on the windows side itself?!
Nice would be one tool which transforms an image to the appropriate iconformats for both win and osx (with keeping leopard and vista in mind) and applies them to the executables - huhuu unity! :O)
As far as I know, Iconographer can manipulate Windows icon files, but not apply them to executables. But I haven’t looked for a new version in a long time so now I’m hoping they’ve added that!
Macromedia Director doesn’t do that, so I actually use some other tool, in VirtualPC, for the final step. It’s a pain. I should go to VersionTracker and look for a Windows-less way to put an icon on an .exe.
I only had a quick shot at it and couldn’t find anything. I also wasn’t this excited about Iconographer. Tools like iconworkshop on win looked easier to me for crossplatform icon creation.
I also only used “Custom icon for application file” on the os i was working on with it…i’ve never needed this for a crossplatform release. Otherwise all these tool makers would have nothing to eat… ;O)
/Developer/Applications/Utilities/Icon Composer.app is your last stop for Mac OS X icons, at least.
Taumel, what’s the best way to make and apply icons for Windows? If it’s not too much of a hassle we’d like to make a custom one for our Windows build.
I haven’t tested it, but you could try using XN Resource Editor to modify the resources in the executable. It seems to have an built in icon editor as well.
I’ve used Axialis AXicons for years, and it works to add icons to Windows executables (like my Director projectors). But I’ve been using an old version and I only just noticed that they’ve added Mac OS X icon support, and a built-in library of OS X style glass icon elements (since Visa will use that style too).
You can produce some pretty awesome vector graphics with it. You may then need to convert the result to make it a compatible icon, but the benefit here is that it uses standard SVG. You can also export the icons / SVG for use in web graphics. You can export to PNG for older browsers or use SVG for modern browsers and even use CSS to style and JavaScript to animate (there are some SVG jQuery plugins that make this neat) so you can create graphics that are easy to repurpose for more than just your icon and help you keep a standard graphical style across your game and marketing materials.