Do you spend part or all of your time creating resolution-independent graphics for the Web? If you do, then you're probably familiar with Opacity. It's a powerful tool for creating icons or other graphic elements that are designed for viewing on a screen rather than on paper.
The developer of Opacity, Like Thought, LLC, is now shipping version 1.1 of their app. Opacity 1.1 requires Mac OS X 10.5.2 and has a redesigned interface with a new grid and dynamically generated images in the toolbar. To make life easier for new users of Opacity, Like Thought also added a "How To" screencast and four new templates.
The biggest addition to Opacity 1.1 is support for SVG vector graphics for the Web. Opacity creates reusable workflows called factories, which now support such cool features as gamma stripping in PNG images, automatic uploading to Web sites using Cyberduck, and multi-page PDF images.
If you own Opacity 1.0, this is a free upgrade. A demo is available for download, and you can purchase Opacity for $89.
If you're an independent Mac software developer, having a wicked cool icon for your application is both a blessing and a curse. Users will remember you for the sleek, Leopard-ready goodness of your icon ... and other unscrupulous marketers will rip you off shamelessly to promote their own products, rather than ponying up for an original design.
The all-time champion victim (self-reported) of icons ripped off is Panic's Transmit FTP tool; the little truck shows up just about everywhere you could possibly imagine. New to the underground icon market, however, is the 1Password browser-key logo -- it may make you think "Hey, I could drive Safari to the supermarket!" but apparently the makers of ProductKeyFinder, a Windows serial number app, found it too delicious to pass up. The purloined product identity is visible on PKF's eBay sales page and on Flickr. It looks like the packaging has been updated (and the product renamed to Product Key Explorer), so this tale of icon swiping has a happy ending.
Forget WWDC, the iPhone App Store and the Apple Design Awards. The one thing we want to see this summer is the new Indiana Jones movie!
We're sure some of you feel the same anticipation, so why not let your Mac in on the fun? The workers at The Iconfactory have launched their month-long tribute to Dr. Jones with Indy-themed freeware icon sets, one for each movie. So far, the Raiders of the Lost Ark set has been released, while The Temple of Doom, Last Crusade, and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull icon sets will debut later this month.
If your using CandyBar (we've written about CandyBar several times), you can make use of the Indy-themed Dock. Finally, round things of with this great desktop picture (it's also available for the iPhone!).
Although I am certainly not a designer, I love and appreciate good iconography, typography, and other graphical elements. The beauty of the OS is just one of many factors that pushed me over the edge to embracing life as a full-time OS X user in the first place.
That said, the process of actually creating my own icons has always struck me as arduous and overwhelming. I'm actually pretty good at Photoshop, but I can't draw a straight line to save my life and that has always scared me off from investigating any further into icon creation.
That's why I'm so excited about the new project from icon designer extraordinaire, Sebastiaan de With. Icon Resource is a new site/service that features high quality screencasts that teach the and explain how to create modern icons using Photoshop. According to Sebastiaan, the screencasts aren't aimed at designers, but instead "intermediate computer users," which makes it perfect for someone like myself.
For € 95 (about $150 USD), users can get a complete IconResource pack that contains screencasts covering not only the history of icon design and icon standards and guidelines, but the entire icon creation process from beginning to end. The screencasts are available in HD or in iPhone/iPod size for portable watching. Additionally, Photoshop files for each tutorial are included and Sebastian offers written documentation as well.
The price point might be a turnoff to some users, but the price is actually on-par with what I have paid for tutorials/books for other design/graphic oriented topics in the past. Sebastiaan has a preview video available on his site, so if you are interested in icon design, check it out!
We did catch this during our liveblog of the SDK talk on Thursday, but just in case you hadn't seen them yet, it seems both the iTunes WiFi store and the calculator will be getting new icons in the iPhone's 2.0 patch. Of course, the App Store will apparently have its own icon as well, and we would assume, at this point, that each app will be able to take its own place on the home screen.
But while the Calculator icon change is kind of a strange one (does this mean the Calc buttons will also be square?), the iTunes change definitely makes sense. That will be the place to download music, while the App Store will be the place to download everything else.
Web designers and enthusiasts are likely already familiar with Dave Shea, the Canadian web designer behind the css Zen Garden and other standards-based web projects. If you're not familiar with him from that angle, you may recognize his Chalkwork series of icons which has just had a set of iPhone & iPod touch icons added to it.
While most of his work comes with a well-deserved price tag, this set is available free of charge. It contains 29 well-designed icons, including the default applications and some select third-party apps. The download includes a selection of Dock and Wallpaper images as well. You'll need a jailbroken iPhone/touch to use them and the set comes with instructions for manual and SummerBoard installations.
iPhone/iPod touch owners (and anyone else who wants to) can download the free icon set at mezzoblue.
Some enterprising iPhone developer named Erica Sadun (we hear she blogs for a fly-by-night Mac site) has been tinkering around with CoverFlow on the iPhone for a book she's writing, and while the result of my doing the same tinkering would be nothing but a broken iPhone, she instead pulls off the opposite: an enhanced iPhone.
AppFlow is a CoverFlow-style interface for launching iPhone apps and icons. You just install the app on your jailbroken iPhone, and then launching your favorite app is as simple as flipping to the icon and double-tapping. Webclips, we're told, are launched a completely different way, and thus not included in the flipping. But "maybe in a later update," our inside source told TUAW exclusively.
If this is the kind of stuff we're getting from Sadun before the SDK drops, just think what we'll see after. The woman's a genius. And it's almost surprising that Apple didn't think of this in the first place -- if it works in Leopard, and it works in the iPod of the iPhone, why didn't they give us the option to flip through apps in this way?
Update: AppFlow has been incorporated into XLaunch and now supports Webclips
If you're like me, then you like to take screenshots and send them to people -- maybe it's to help them through an issue with their computer, or just to document something -- either way, icons on your desktop can get in the way. There are a couple things you could do to get rid of the icons: use command + shift + 4 + space bar to only take a picture of the current window, or you could move all of your icons to a folder.
This is where Camouflage comes in. It allows you to hide your desktop icons with a single click. Just click it's menu bar icon and ... BOOM ... the icons fade off your desktop. Click the menu bar icon again to have them fade back in. You can also assign a hot key and use a custom wallpaper when it is activated. Sometimes it's the simple things that amaze me.
Best of all, Camouflage is absolutely free (donations are accepted). You can download Camouflage from the developer's website.
When it comes to my desktop and the icons that sit upon it, I have a fondness for darkness. It's not because of a fatalistic world view or any gothic tendencies on my part, I simply like my work to pop out against a non-distracting background. The black desktop is easy, but I've been looking for a fast and easy way to darken my icons without a lot of bells and whistles. And then I stumbled upon FolderTeint.
FolderTeint is free and Leopard-only. Using its slick interface, you can select which folders to affect and apply different effects to each selected set. The simplicity of the interface is what I like the most. The adjustment HUD only allows you to change the contrast, saturation and brightness of the icons, with an optional overlay color for hue control. It's perfect for making your system folder icons a nice, dark shade of grey. But to answer the question before it's asked: yes, it's also simple to make every folder a different shade of hot pink. Fortunately for those who regret their iconic 80s tribute later, you're always a click (and a logout) away from restoring the stock icons.
FolderTeint is free to download and use, but I'm certain that author Thomas Zoechling would gladly accept some PayPal love.
Update: Please read the comments carefully before downloading. While I've had great success with changing and reverting icons on a MacBook Pro running 10.5.1, not everyone has had such luck. Also be sure to note the author's response in the comments!
Soon after Steve Jobs announced the new 1.1.3, Emil Hedaya realized that a simple meta-refreseh redirect would allow him to create custom icons for any webclip. All you need is a website of your own. You link to your custom pages and have them redirect you to the sites in question.
To demonstrate this he's put together a set of iPhone shortcuts to his favorite sites (including Meebo, Fandango, Flickr and more). If you navigate to his page and webclip off those links, you'll create some great looking icons on your SpringBoard Home page instead of the dull defaults.
Update: Redirected the links to http://redmedia.com/i/ at Emil's request to avoid overloading his server.
The developers at Panic have released CandyBar version 3.1.2. If you're unfamiliar, CandyBar 3 is a super simple and fun way to customize Mac OS X's icons and dock (Leopard required). Version 3 introduced some very cool features - like Pixadex integration - that make this killer app even cooler.
Changes to version 3.1.2 include:
Importing Pixadex libraries on first launch is more reliable
Application and volume icons update more reliably in the Finder
Fixed a potential problem with generic file icons
There's more, of course, and you can read the change log here. CandyBar 3.1.2 is a free upgrade for registered users for version 3.x (a single license will cost you $29US).
If you've ever used CandyBar before, you probably already grabbed version 3 when it was released the other day. But just in case you haven't seen it in action, Ged put together this great screencast of just how easy it makes controlling the look of your icons and Dock. I especially love the icons inside the iContainers in Quick Look-- such a neat, useful touch that's only possible in Leopard.
CandyBar, I think, is one of those apps that sounds like you'll never use it when you just read the text (because how often do you change your system icons, really), but once you see just how amazing it is, you can tell it's one of those reasons we're so proud to be Mac owners. I know, I sound like an infomercial, but look at that app! CandyBar 3 is available as a free 15-day/250-icon limit trial, or for the purchase price of $29.
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 mentionedbefore) has cooked up an excellent little Quicksilver plugin called IconGrabber that does exactly what it sounds like. It allows you to easily create an image of an application icon at an arbitrary resolution in one of several popular image formats. Using a few simple terminal commands to change the defaults you can select the default image size and format. So, for instance, here at TUAW we post lots of icons at 125px wide in the jpeg format. With IconGrabber I can now create those images in one step as you see above, where I'm saving the Time Machine icon to my TUAW pictures folder. If you're not a Quicksilver fiend, Ankur also has a stand-alone application to do the same thing. In any case, if you regularly need to extract icons as images, IconGrabber is a godsend.
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 little tutorial I'll show you how to make your own customized drawer icons using nothing more than Preview. Obviously you can get much sophisticated results using a more serious image editing application, but Preview can do enough to get you the results you see above and since everyone has it, I thought it best to focus on using it despite its limitations.
We reported on Trampoline a while back-- it's a radial application launcher that bills itself as a way to give you quick access to your "core set" of tools. A few people have marked it as very similar to Sapiens, and that's true-- both are circular launchers that allow you to fire off applications quickly when you need them. Sapiens is a great application, but it seems to have a little more under the hood in terms of learning your apps and where to place them, whereas Trampoline seems to be more interested in just providing quick access, not mapping your apps out for you. The other main difference in usage seems to be that Sapiens can be activated with a circular mouse movement (sometimes a bonus, sometimes an annoyance, if you didn't mean to activate it), while Trampoline is activated with a mappable hotkey. It's up to you whether one is more or less efficient than the other.
At any rate, this is your Mac we're talking about, so you can use either or both or none. Trampoline's Joseph Wardell let us know that his application has just been updated to 2.3.2, which brings better compatibility with Leopard applications (including Time Machine), and some speed updates and improvements. Trampoline remains shareware (just like Sapiens, incidentally)-- use a trial for as long as you want, or support the application with a purchase for $19.95.
Do you spend part or all of your time creating resolution-independent graphics for the Web? If you do, then you're probably familiar with Opacity. It's a powerful tool for creating icons or other graphic elements that are designed for viewing on a screen rather than on paper.
Forget WWDC, the iPhone App Store and the Apple Design Awards. The one thing we want to see this summer is the new 
Although I am certainly not a designer, I love and appreciate good iconography, typography, and other graphical elements. The beauty of the OS is just one of many factors that pushed me over the edge to embracing life as a full-time OS X user in the first place.
Web designers and enthusiasts are likely already familiar with 
If you're like me, then you like to take screenshots and send them to people -- maybe it's to help them through an issue with their computer, or just to document something -- either way, icons on your desktop can get in the way. There are a couple things you could do to get rid of the icons: use command + shift + 4 + space bar to only take a picture of the current window, or you could move all of your icons to a folder.
When it comes to my desktop and the icons that sit upon it, I have a fondness for darkness. It's not because of a fatalistic world view or any gothic tendencies on my part, I simply like my work to pop out against a non-distracting background. The black desktop is easy, but I've been looking for a fast and easy way to darken my icons without a lot of bells and whistles. And then I stumbled upon FolderTeint.
The developers at Panic have released 
