Icon Machine is an icon editor which you can use to create custom icons and customize the icons of your files, folders, and disks. You can create the images yourself, or import them from another application such as Adobe Photoshop. For more information, please see the help files available from Icon Machine's Help menu.
What's new Icon Machine III
- New full-size icon!
- New logo!
- In the spirit of better Photoshop immitation (but without risking patent infringement), the window has been split up into a couple of parts. The tools palette is now in a floating window, and the icon document window just shows the icons. Double-clicking an icon opens an editing window for it, so you can edit multiple members of the same icon family at the same time.
- The editing windows have zoom levels from 200% to 1600%.
- New Transparency view, in addition to the old Image and Mask views.
- No more gridlines. Photoshop doesn't have them, not many people used them, and they looked ugly in Transparency view.
- The preview pane is gone. Selecting the background type now affects the icon window's boxes instead.
- Copying or dragging images from Icon Machine to Photoshop preserves the mask transparency.
- Added the standard Carbon "Window" menu
- Because Apple has commandeered command-M as Collapse/Minimize Window, I had to change Show Mask to command-Y. Every other letter in "show mask" was taken (K will be for creating new icons in resource files, as in ResEdit).
- Speaking of shortcuts, the keyboard shortcut for the Pencil tool is now B instead of Y, as it is in Photoshop 6.
- Icon data is written to the data fork of a file in the Mac OS X .icns format, in addition to being pasted as a file's custom icon. This also helps prevent Finder bugs from eating your icons, although it does make bigger files since the icon is stored twice. A future version (probably 3.1) will let you specify whether to save the data as a custom icon, or in the data fork, or both.
- Palette windows snap to other windows and screen borders as you drag them, even respecting the position of the Dock.
- Uses standard "save sheets" in OS X.
- Hierarchical font menu, and the Size menu now includes 36 and 48 points.
- Icon Machine III is a Carbon application, requiring CarbonLib 1.4 or later (which requires Mac OS 8.6 or later). You can download CarbonLib from the Apple web site.
- Icons can be exported to a variety of image file formats, using QuickTime graphics exporters.
- Um... oh yeah, and support for Mini (16x12), Huge (48x48) and Thumbnail (128x128) icons.
Shareware
Icon Machine is not free, but you may try it out before deciding to buy it. The cost is $25, payable online at http://order.kagi.com/?2YD or by mail (using the included Register program). Aside from the reminder that appears when you launch the program, Icon Machine is not "crippled" in any way before you register.
Changes in version 3.0 (from 3.0b22)
- Fixed a crash that happened when pasting images copied from Preview
- Fixed text in non-32-bit icons (it wasn't being drawn at all)
- Switching between image, mask, and transparency views ends a text editing session
- Fixed 32-bit text in image-only mode
- Fixed garbage created by the Fix Mask command
- Fixed a cosmetic problem with the grayscale slider (it didn't erase right when the dropper tool was used)
- Fixed redraw after Paste Icon Family in OS 8/9
Lost in the translation: (features that were in version 2)
- Tear-off palettes are gone due to Carbon limitations. Instead, use the commands in the Window menu to show the palette windows.
- The Window menu no longer shows icons next to the window names. This is because I'm using the standard Carbon window menu which doesn't support adding icons.
- I had to adjust the hotspots on the pencil and bucket cursors so they're no longer exactly like the traditional MacPaint cursors. This is due to a limitation in OS X.
Communication
If you have a question, suggestion, bug report, or anything else, you can:
- E-mail me at dathorc@kagi.com
- Post in the web forum at http://uncommonplace.com/forums/
