Icon Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Put your favorite apps on the fridge with app magnets

by Mike Schramm (Oct 11th, 2010)

These are great -- a company called Jailbreak Toys (name unrelated -- I think) has apparently been selling a set of "App Magnets," little square magnets that feature icons for Apple's official iPhone apps. How cool -- I'd love to have a Photos, Safari, or an App Store icon to pin things up on the ...

Fake Steve Jobs to be a TV show

by Mike Schramm (Mar 17th, 2010)

Dan Lyons, better known as blogger Fake Steve Jobs, has apparently signed a deal with Seinfeld writer Larry Charles to create a half-hour, single camera, satirical TV show about a Silicon Valley hotshot. As of now, Lyons is only writing the pilot script for the series, but since it's called "iCON," ...

Finder icon birthday cake will make your day

by Mike Schramm (Nov 22nd, 2009)

If there's one thing I like better than pie, it's cake. And if there's a best kind of cake, it's definitely one that's shaped in the form of something geeky. Which means the video above, which shows what seems to be a tasty confection in the form of Apple's Finder icon, hits the spot perfectly. ...

Spell it out with your Dock

by Robert Palmer (Jun 24th, 2009)

For your early-afternoon entertainment, I have the story of Mike Giepert, who happened one day to spell something clever with the icons in his dock. His website, in fact, has a whole raft of these sets, including those submitted by his readers, to spell everything from "vamp" to "agoraphobic." What ...

Emoji for iChat adds... emoji to iChat

by Mat Lu (Jun 18th, 2009)

With the release of iPhone OS 3.0, I was wondering if emoji icons still worked (they do), and then it finally dawned on me: why not iChat? A quick search turned up exactly what I was looking for: Emoji for iChat. This free downloadable icon pack basically adds the iPhone Emoji icons to iChat, ...

RetroMacCast interviews Rob Janoff

by Mike Schramm (May 25th, 2009)

The guys over at the RetroMacCast sent us a link to their latest episode, featuring an interview with none other than Rob Janoff, the designer of Apple's old rainbow Mac logo. The interview starts a little less than halfway into the show, and it's cool to hear a voice right out of Apple's past. ...

Mac 101: Learn more about your files at a glance

by Robert Palmer (May 18th, 2009)

Welcome to another edition of Mac 101, TUAW's series for beginners. Today, we show you how to get more bang for your desktop real-estate buck with Finder icon labels. Have you ever wanted to know how large a picture on your Desktop was, but didn't want to open it (or even just hit ⌘I to get info)? ...

We [heart] Icons really does [heart] icons

by Aron Trimble (May 9th, 2009)

One of the most common ways to customize your tried-and-true desktop is by changing the wallpaper. While easy and effective, the wallpaper switcheroo is not the only trick up the sleeves of the customizers among us. For some, the most rewarding customization results from replacing icons. There are ...

Learn how to draw a Mac network node sphere with this tutorial

by Robert Palmer (Jan 5th, 2009)

If you've always wondered how to draw a "ball of nodes" as featured in a variety of Mac OS X icons, wonder no more: Mike Rundle of flyosity.com has written a tutorial to show you how using Photoshop. Rundle discusses "spheric realism," the process of understanding the materials, reflectivity, and ...

What's in an icon?

by Mike Schramm (Dec 5th, 2008)

Gedeon Maheux has an post about how an icon is designed from the aptly-named Iconfactory (specifically the Frenzic app icon), and while I don't have any design skills to speak of at all, it's an interesting look into how those little snippets of art are made. Icons are increasingly important, ...

Apple's System Preference icon goes "Green"

by Cory Bohon (Oct 21st, 2008)

With the introduction of EPEAT Gold rated MacBooks and MacBook Pros last week, Apple has definitely been warming up to the environmental movement lately. So, it was only fitting that they would change a small part of System Preferences to reflect the EPEAT rating. That's right, the Energy Saver ...

Apple's worst logo ever?

by Dave Caolo (Jun 11th, 2008)

I'm eager to test out Apple's upcoming MobileMe service, the .Mac replacement scheduled to launch in a few weeks. Unfortunately for many, my enthusiasm is matched by disdain for the MobileMe logo. Gawker says "...it should be on a package of Japanese soap." Paul Thurrott notices a similarity between ...

CandyBar 3 available now

by Christina Warren (Nov 27th, 2007)

This is going to sound sad, but the one application that I have missed the most in upgrading to Leopard is CandyBar 2. I've always been something of a customization addict, and being able to take advantage of some of the beautiful icons that artists have made over the years to make OS X look its ...

IconGrabber: easy icon extraction

by Mat Lu (Nov 27th, 2007)

This one is a little bit of inside (blogging) baseball, but I know a lot of our readers blog themselves and so might find this tip handy. Ankur Kothari (whose Quicksilver customizations we've mentioned before) has cooked up an excellent little Quicksilver plugin called IconGrabber that does exactly ...

TUAW Tutorial: Custom Stack Drawer icons

by Mat Lu (Nov 16th, 2007)

Many folks commented on our recent post about adding those gorgeous drawer icons to your Stacks. As great as the originals are, however, a lot of you also wanted to know how to customize them. Fortunately, the original author was kind enough to make the blank drawer PNG available, so in this ...