What’s the secret to getting good results from Icon Composer?
That’s actually very easy to answer. Most of all, a good design that follows the ideals set forth in Apples HIG (Human Interface Guidlines). But aside from that, you need to use Photoshop for the final image. Regardless of how you design the initial image, in Photoshop, create two layers. One for the image, one for a black shape that is the same outline as the image. Make sure you’ve got a square canvass in Photoshop also. Then, Save As… select TIFF as the format, with no compression and preserve layers.
Now drop that tiff file onto icon composer. You’ll get as good as possible at this point.
2 comments ↓
The correction I’d make to this posting is to *not* use TIFF as the save format. I could not get the mask to work properly that way. However, when I saved as PNG the mask came across properly. Googling yielded others who had the same experience. So it appears that Apple’s “Icon Composer” is an odd little utility–you must drag & drop onto its open window–dragging to its Dock icon doesn’t work, nor does File->Open. And it really prefers PNG.
I should mention, that the post was written using XCode 2.5 on 10.4.11 Tiger.
In XCode 3.x on 10.5.x Leopard and its related Icon Composer app, you DO want to use PNG files. The big caveat about it is this: be very careful about your shadows and blurs. Export from Photoshop and test the image in Icon Composer before committing to it. You may find after producing the .icns file, that you’ve got a bit of chopped off drop shadow, or even too much.
Icon Composer is not a fully featured app, unfortunately. It is strictly utilitarian. I just wish Apple would open source Icon Composer. I’m 100% positive it would result in free improvements to the app or even straight-away plugins for other apps.
The good news is, the new version of Icon Composer handles PNG’s much better, and also generates the 1-bit alpha masks much better!
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