The macOS menu bar is a great place for quickly accessing system and application functions using menu extras or 'menulets', but it can get cluttered pretty quickly as more and more icons vie for a.
App Icon
Although Mac OS X has a very nice looking interface but if you want to customize your Mac OS X to a higher level you will certainly need some icons to do so. BTW, here is a guide for those users who would like to Install Windows on Mac too, you can take a look. Free Apple icons! Download 378 vector icons and icon kits.Available in PNG, ICO or ICNS icons for Mac for free use.
Beautiful app icons are an important part of the user experience on all Apple platforms. A unique, memorable icon evokes your app and can help people recognize it at a glance on the desktop, in Finder, and in the Dock. Polished, expressive icons can also hint at an app’s personality and even its overall level of quality.
In macOS 11, app icons share a common set of visual attributes, including the rounded-rectangle shape, front-facing perspective, level position, and uniform drop shadow. Rooted in the macOS 11 design language, these attributes showcase the lifelike rendering style people expect in macOS while presenting a harmonious user experience. To download templates that specify the correct shape and drop shadow, see Apple Design Resources.
IMPORTANT When you update your app for macOS 11, use your new app icon design to replace the icon you designed for earlier versions. You can’t include two different app icons for one app, and the macOS 11 app icon style looks fine on a Mac running Catalina or earlier.
Design a beautiful icon that clearly represents your app. Combine an engaging design with an artistic interpretation of your app’s purpose that people can instantly understand.
Embrace simplicity. Find a concept or element that captures the essence of your app and express it in a simple, unique way, adding details only when doing so enhances meaning. Too many details can be hard to discern and can make the icon appear muddy, especially at smaller sizes.
Establish a single focus point. A single, centered point of interest captures the user’s attention and helps them recognize your app at a glance. Presenting multiple focus points can obscure the icon’s message.
To give people a familiar and consistent experience, prefer a design that works well across multiple platforms. If your app runs on other platforms, use a similar image for all app icons while rendering them in the style that’s appropriate for each platform. For example, in iOS and watchOS, the Mail app icon depicts the white envelope in a streamlined, graphical style; in macOS 11, the envelope includes depth and detail that communicate a realistic weight and texture.
macOS 11
Consider depicting a familiar tool to communicate what people use your app to do. To give context to your app’s purpose, you can use the icon background to portray the tool’s environment or the items it affects. For example, the TextEdit icon pairs a mechanical pencil with a sheet of lined paper to suggest a utilitarian writing experience. After you create a detailed, realistic image of a tool, it often works well to let it float just above the background and extend slightly past the icon boundaries. If you do this, make sure the tool remains visually unified with the background and doesn’t overwhelm the rounded-rectangle shape.
Make real objects look real. If you depict real objects in your app icon, make them look like they’re made of physical materials and have actual mass. Replicate the characteristics of substances like fabric, glass, paper, and metal to convey an object’s weight and feel. For example, the Xcode app icon features a hammer that looks like it has a steel head and polymer grip.
If text is essential for communicating your app’s purpose, consider creating a graphic abstraction of it. Actual text in an icon can be difficult to read and doesn’t support accessibility or localization. To give the impression of text without implying that people should zoom in to read it, you can create a graphic texture that suggests it.
To depict photos or parts of your app’s UI, create idealized images that emphasize the features you want people to notice. Photos are often full of details that obscure the main content when viewed at small sizes. If you want to use a photo in your icon, pick one with strongly contrasting values that make the main subject stand out. Remove unimportant details that make primary lines and shapes fuzzy or indistinct. If your app has a UI that people recognize, avoid simply replicating standard UI elements or using a screenshot in your icon. Instead, consider designing a graphic that echoes the UI and expresses the personality of your app.
Don’t use replicas of Apple hardware products. Apple products are copyrighted and can’t be reproduced in your icons or images. Avoid displaying replicas of devices, because hardware designs tend to change frequently and can make your icon look dated.
Use the drop shadow in the icon-design template. The template includes the system-defined drop shadow that helps your app icon coordinate with other macOS 11 icons.
Consider using interior shadows and highlights to add definition and realism. For example, the Mail app icon uses both shadows and highlights to give the envelope authenticity and to suggest that the flap is slightly open. In icons that include a tool that floats above a background — such as TextEdit or Xcode — interior shadows can strengthen the perception of depth and make the tool look real. Shadows and highlights should suggest a light source that faces the icon, positioned just above center and tilted slightly downward.
Avoid defining contours that suggest a shape other than a rounded rectangle. In rare cases, you might want to fine-tune the basic app icon shape, but doing so risks creating an icon that looks like it doesn’t belong in macOS 11. If you must alter the shape, prefer subtle adjustments that continue to express a rounded rectangle silhouette.
Consider adding a slight glow just inside the edges of your icon. If your app icon includes a dark reflective surface, like glass or metal, add an inner glow to make the icon stand out and prevent it from appearing to dissolve into dark backgrounds.
Keep primary content within the icon grid bounding box; keep all content within the outer bounding box. If an icon’s primary content extends beyond the icon grid bounding box, it tends to look out of place. If you overlay a tool on your icon, it works well to align the tool’s top edge with the outer bounding box and its bottom edge with the inner bounding box, as shown below.
In addition to the bounding boxes and suggested tool placement, the icon design template provides a grid to help you position items within an icon. You can also use the icon grid to ensure that centered inner elements like circles use a size that’s consistent with other icons in the system.
Mac Icon Png
App Icon Attributes
Free Icons For Mac
All app icons should use the following specifications.
| Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
| Format | PNG |
| Color space | Display P3 (wide-gamut color), sRGB (color), or Gray Gamma 2.2 (grayscale) |
| Layers | Flattened with transparency as appropriate |
| Resolution | @1x and @2x (see Image Size and Resolution) |
| Shape | Square with no rounded corners |
Don’t provide app icons in ICNS or JPEG format. The ICNS format doesn’t support features like wide color gamut or deliver the performance and efficiency you get when you use asset catalogs. JPEG doesn’t support transparency through alpha channels, and its compression can blur or distort an icon’s images. For best results, add deinterlaced PNG files to the app icon fields of your Xcode project’s asset catalog.
App Icon Sizes
Your app icon is displayed in many places, including in Finder, the Dock, Launchpad, and the App Store. To ensure that your app icon looks great everywhere people see it, provide it in the following sizes:
- 512x512 pt (512x512 px @1x, 1024x1024 px @2x)
- 256x256 pt (256x256 px @1x, 512x512 px @2x)
- 128x128 pt (128x128 px @1x, 256x256 px @2x)
- 32x32 pt (32x32 px @1x, 64x64 px @2x)
- 16x16 pt (16x16 px @1x, 32x32 px @2x)
Maintain visual consistency in all icon sizes. As icon size decreases, fine details become muddy and hard to distinguish. At the smallest sizes, it’s important to remove unnecessary features and exaggerate primary features to help the content remain clear. As you simplify icons that are visually smaller, don’t let them appear drastically different from their larger counterparts. Strive to make subtle variations that ensure the icon remains visually consistent when displayed in different environments. For example, if people drag your icon between displays with different resolutions, the icon’s appearance shouldn’t suddenly change.
The 512x512 pt Safari app icon (on the left) uses a circle of tick marks to indicate degrees; the 16x16 pt version of the icon (on the right) doesn’t include this detail.
| Filename extension | |
|---|---|
| Type code | icns |
| Uniform Type Identifier (UTI) | com.apple.icns |
| Developed by | Apple Inc. |
| Type of format |
The Apple Icon Image format is the icon format used in Apple Inc.'s macOS. It supports icons of 16 × 16, 32 × 32, 48 × 48, 128 × 128, 256 × 256, 512 × 512 points at 1x and 2x scale, with both 1- and 8-bitalpha channels and multiple image states (example: open and closed folders). The fixed-size icons can be scaled by the operating system and displayed at any intermediate size.
File structure[edit]
The file format consists of an 8 byte header, followed by any number of icons.
Header[edit]
| Offset | Size | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 4 | Magic literal, must be 'icns' (0x69, 0x63, 0x6e, 0x73) |
| 4 | 4 | Length of file, in bytes, msb first |
Microsoft Office For Mac Icon
Icon data[edit]
| Offset | Size | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 4 | Icon type, see OSType below. |
| 4 | 4 | Length of data, in bytes (including type and length), msb first |
| 8 | Variable | Icon data |
Compression[edit]
| lead value | tail bytes | result uncompressed |
|---|---|---|
| 0…127 | 1…128 | 1…128 bytes |
| 128…255 | 1 byte | 3…130 copies |
Over time the format has been improved and there is support for compression of some parts of the pixel data. The 32-bit ('is32', 'il32', 'ih32','it32') and ARGB ('ic04', 'ic05') pixel data are often compressed (per channel) with a format similar to PackBits.[1]Some sources mentioned that the OS supports both compressed or uncompressed data chunks.
The following pseudocode decompresses the data:
Example: 02 01 02 02 80 03 81 04 82 05 should decompress to 01 02 02 03 03 03 04 04 04 04 05 05 05 05 05
Icon types[edit]
Trash Bin For Mac Icons
| OSType | Length (bytes) | Size (pixels) | Supported OS Version | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ICON | 128 | 32 | 1.0 | 32×32 1-bit mono icon |
| ICN# | 256 | 32 | 6.0 | 32×32 1-bit mono icon with 1-bit mask |
| icm# | 48 | 16 | 6.0 | 16×12 1 bit mono icon with 1-bit mask |
| icm4 | 96 | 16 | 7.0 | 16×12 4 bit icon |
| icm8 | 192 | 16 | 7.0 | 16×12 8 bit icon |
| ics# | 64 (32 img + 32 mask) | 16 | 6.0 | 16×16 1-bit mask |
| ics4 | 128 | 16 | 7.0 | 16×16 4-bit icon |
| ics8 | 256 | 16 | 7.0 | 16x16 8 bit icon |
| is32 | varies (768) | 16 | 8.5 | 16×16 24-bit icon |
| s8mk | 256 | 16 | 8.5 | 16x16 8-bit mask |
| icl4 | 512 | 32 | 7.0 | 32×32 4-bit icon |
| icl8 | 1,024 | 32 | 7.0 | 32×32 8-bit icon |
| il32 | varies (3,072) | 32 | 8.5 | 32x32 24-bit icon |
| l8mk | 1,024 | 32 | 8.5 | 32×32 8-bit mask |
| ich# | 288 | 48 | 8.5 | 48×48 1-bit mask |
| ich4 | 1,152 | 48 | 8.5 | 48×48 4-bit icon |
| ich8 | 2,304 | 48 | 8.5 | 48×48 8-bit icon |
| ih32 | varies (6,912) | 48 | 8.5 | 48×48 24-bit icon |
| h8mk | 2,304 | 48 | 8.5 | 48×48 8-bit mask |
| it32 | varies (49,152) | 128 | 10.0 | 128×128 24-bit icon |
| t8mk | 16,384 | 128 | 10.0 | 128×128 8-bit mask |
| icp4 | varies | 16 | 10.7 | 16x16 icon in JPEG 2000 or PNG format |
| icp5 | varies | 32 | 10.7 | 32x32 icon in JPEG 2000 or PNG format |
| icp6 | varies | 64 | 10.7 | 64x64 icon in JPEG 2000 or PNG format |
| ic07 | varies | 128 | 10.7 | 128x128 icon in JPEG 2000 or PNG format |
| ic08 | varies | 256 | 10.5 | 256×256 icon in JPEG 2000 or PNG format |
| ic09 | varies | 512 | 10.5 | 512×512 icon in JPEG 2000 or PNG format |
| ic10 | varies | 1024 | 10.7 | 1024×1024 in 10.7 (or 512x512@2x 'retina' in 10.8) icon in JPEG 2000 or PNG format |
| ic11 | varies | 32 | 10.8 | 16x16@2x 'retina' icon in JPEG 2000 or PNG format |
| ic12 | varies | 64 | 10.8 | 32x32@2x 'retina' icon in JPEG 2000 or PNG format |
| ic13 | varies | 256 | 10.8 | 128x128@2x 'retina' icon in JPEG 2000 or PNG format |
| ic14 | varies | 512 | 10.8 | 256x256@2x 'retina' icon in JPEG 2000 or PNG format |
| ic04 | varies | 16 | 16x16 ARGB | |
| ic05 | varies | 32 | 32x32 ARGB | |
| icsB | varies | 36 | 36x36 | |
| icsb | varies | 18 | 18x18 |
- the values inside the brackets () in the length column is the uncompressed length.
- the ARGB format consists of the ascii values for 'ARGB' and the four compressed channels tightly packed
Other types[edit]
| OSType | Length (bytes) | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 'TOC ' | varies | 'Table of Contents' a list of all image types in the file, and their sizes (added in Mac OS X 10.7) |
| 'icnV' | 4 | 4-byte big endian float - equal to the bundle version number of Icon Composer.app that created to icon |
| 'name' | Unknown | |
| 'info' | 259 | Info binary plist. Usage unknown |
Support[edit]
Various image viewers can load *.icns files, and free and open source converters from or to PNG also exist.[2][3]GTK+ can load *.icns resources since 2007.[4] Other tools supporting the format include the Apple Icon Composer and icns Browser, The Iconfactory, and IconBuilder.
MacOS[clarification needed] offers the built-in iconutil command line tool to pack and unpack *.icns files.
External links[edit]
- IconFamily – Open source Objective C class to read and write Apple icns files
- osxiconutils - Command line tools to work with Apple icns files
See also[edit]
- ICO format on Windows
- X PixMap format for X11
References[edit]
- ^Macintosh Icons
- ^'libicns'. SourceForge project icns. 2009. Retrieved August 18, 2016.
- ^'png2icns'. Moin Uddin. 2016. Retrieved May 25, 2017.
- ^Lyonel Vincent (2007). 'Mac OS X icons for GTK+'. Retrieved August 18, 2016.