This little utility is designed to help you create 32 bit icons (which are available under MacOS 8.5 and above). Since Apple has chosen (for the time being) not to release an editor, I've created clip2icns to fill that gap. It takes a picture from the clipboard, splits it up into the icon and mask, and either inserts it into a current file or makes a new icon.
Usage
First a quick explanation on how 32 bit icons work. All of their data is stored in an icns resource, including the 32, 8, 4, and 1 bit versions (you should also old style resources (icl8, ICN#, ics8, etc) for backwards compatibility). When drawing the icon the MacOS takes the icon and uses the mask to display it. Unlike the old masks where you only had two colors, white as transparent and black as opaque, the new 8 bit masks allow you to use grays to have semi-transparency. For example a light gray would make the icon be almost totally transparent, while a dark one would make it almost totally opaque. This semi-transparency can be used to create cool effects, such as translucent icons, drop shadows that look good on any background and anti-aliasing. For some examples of these effects see the clippings in the Goodies folder.
clip2icns creates the icon by taking the clipboard data and splitting it up into different sections. The picture above shows how the 80x32 image is divided up. If you don't want to you can omit the small version (thus the image size would be 64x32), and the Finder will shrink down the image automatically (although chances are that the result won't look so great). You can also make icons that only have the small version (so the image would be 16x32), but chances are that this is useful only if you make Kaleidoscope schemes.
Here are the steps used in creating or modifying icons:
1. Create an 80x32, 64x32 or 16x32 image with your favorite image editor
2. Paint the icon(s) and mask(s) in their appropriate positions (see the image above)
3. Select the whole image and copy it to the clipboard.
4. Open up clip2icns.
5. Choose either New Icon From Clipboard… or Insert Icon Into File… from the File menu (you can also drag a file onto the application to insert an icon into it)
6. Pick a file or choose a spot to save the new icon (depending on which command you chose)
7. Pick an icon ID if necessary (the other IDs are only use useful for developers of Kaleidoscope schemes).
8. Click the Insert button and voila, the icon has been created.
There is another menu command, Extract Icon to Clipboard…, which does the opposite of the above commands. It takes an icon and generates an 80x32 picture that contains the icon and mask, as well as the small versions. This is useful if you want to tweak someone else's icons, or if you want to see how they've done a certain trick.
Under the Edit menu there is a Preferences… command. You can use this to set a few global preferences.
• Include old style resources (if any) will make clip2icns look for old style icons (which use icl8, ICN#, ics8, etc resources) and if they're found they will be included into the new icns resource. They will only be displayed if you're at lower bit depths and you're running MacOS 8.5.
• Generate old style resources will create icl8, ICN#, ics8, etc resources. However, chanes are that they will be horribly dithered.
• Set bits Kaleidoscope-style will set the Purgeable and System Heap bits for the icon. This is only useful if you develop Kaleidoscope schemes.
• Name resources will give the resources names (based on the ones that appear in the menu). The only reason why you might want to turn this off is if you want to save a few extra bytes in file size.
Shareware Info
clip2icns is shareware; it is NOT free. If you use clip2icns for more than a few icons you should pay a $10 registration fee. Registrations for clip2icns are handled by the Kagi Shareware service run by Kee Nethery. In addition to cash in various currencies and US dollar checks drawn on US banks, Kagi Shareware also accepts credit card registrations by snail-mail or e-mail (your card number is scrambled). For organizations, they handle invoices and site licenses, too. To register please use the enclosed Register application or register online at http://order.kagi.com/?QEJ. You will receive a registration code from Kagi, and when you enter that and your name in the registration dialog (available from the Apple menu) the reminder will be disabled.
Tips
If you're confused as to what some of the new system icons are, when using Mihai's utility there is an option under the file menu that allows you to extract an icon to the clipboard. Make a copy of your System Resource file in your system
folder, and extract the icons from that. Then once you've tweaked them to your liking, you can then use the tool to paste them into your scheme.
Billy Martin
Version History
1.1 October 31 1998
- fixed a serious compression bug
- when you type in an ID in the insertion or export dialogs, that icon will be previewed and the menu will show its name
- you can now type in any ID you want in the dialog, and the resource will be named properly
- name generation can be turned off in the preferences dialog
- old style icons can be generated too (but chances are that they will look horrible)
- mail and homepage links in the about box are now clickable (Internet Config is required for this)
- about box should work under 8.1 and lower
- added a sample translucent icon to the Goodies folder
1.0 October 20, 1998
- first public release
Future Plans
I'm planning to turn this tool into a Photoshop plug-in which takes a layer and it's transparency data and converts it into an icon (thus greatly easing icon creation if you use many transparency effects).
Thanks
All the beta testers, who put up with my very informal releases.
Emy Parparita for helping me out with the compression.
Mathemaesthetics for creating Resorcerer, the only tool that can currently disassemble (and soon view) icns.
All the people who helped with clip2icns.
Arlo Rose for giving me the icns specs. Although, no thanks to him for not shipping my hat properly or not telling me about the compression :p
