Tutorial: Custom MAC Icons

, , , , , ,

I never realized how easy making your own icons for the MAC OSX really was. This will show you how to make custom icons for any folder, application, and even removable media like a thumb-drive or SD Card. First Make sure you have these applications:

Necessary:
Xcode (also on all MAC OSX install discs)
Icns2Rsrc (freeware)

Optional:
Photoshop (to make your icons MORE custom)
Illustrator (to make icons from super scratch)
Beastie Boys music (to jam out while you create custom icons)

Now, get the Beastie Boy album started and lets get started...

Ok, what I will be using for this tutorial is an SD Card (I use a thumb drive adapter to connect my SD card to the USB port). Usually when you connect removable media you get a generic icon for all of that similar media type. This SD Card (using a thumb drive adapter) looks like this when I insert it. Insert your card now. This is why we want to change things right? The card I am using is a 2Gig SD card dedicated for use only in my Nintendo Wii, so lets find a base image that we want to use on a Google image search.

Image Search: Try to find something nice and high resolution, with prefferably a size close to 512x512 pixels. Sometimes the Mac may want to make things this big - Ive never seen it so if you cant find an image that big its totally cool, but AT LEAST try to shoot for something 128x128. Here is the raw image I found and want to use, I am going to enhance this image in photoshop, but if you don't want to edit anything, then just skip ahead to step: Icon Composer.

Photoshop: Open your image in photoshop, check it's image size by "Image/Image Size..." on the top menu bar. it should tell you the dimensions of your image, this one is 582x615, Nice and big. When you find your size, decide which one of these it will best fit into:
  • 512x512
  • 256x256
  • 128x128
Mine is nice and large so we are going to start a New, Transparent, 512x512 image. Copy your image out of its photoshop window and paste it into the blank photoshop window, resize it so it has some space all around it and get rid of all that background white space. Then add a nice small DropShadow, if you cant find it just hit "Help" and type "drop", you should see "drop shadow" in the list. Go into that and edit the drop shadow to something you like, keep it subtle and don't let the shadow go outside the image boundary box. here are the settings I used. You should get a nice image that looks something like this Wii here. Save As... Whatevername you want to give it, and save it to a nice place, make sure its a".png" file to keep that transparancy wink

Icon Composer: Open this program found in "/Developer/Applications/Utilities", and then outside the program find the folder that is holding your saved image, drag the icon from the folder onto the size that best fits your original image, we have a big azz image so I will drop it into the biggest slot, and click "copy to all smaller sizes". You should get something like this image to the right. Lookin' good! you can hit "Preview" on the bottom to take a cool peek at it against wallpapers, just make sure when in the preiview mode you click the button next to the slider bar, and pick something cool, I like to compare it against the "Grass Blades" - Now decide weather you like it, need to edit details more in photoshop, or pick a new image entirely. If you like it then "File/Save As..." to a place where you can find it again. I made sure to have a folder dedicated to all files from this program wink. I named my file WiiSD.

Icns2Rsrc: Open this program from wherever you saved and unzipped it. When you open this program you will see NO WINDOWS popup, don't panic, you will know you are in the right place if you see the program name in the top left of the screen. Click "File/Open..." and find your file, the program will instantly ask where you want to save your new ".rsrc" file, save it where you will find it, I made yet another folder dedicated to files from this program, name it something like "Final Mac icons".

Final Steps: There really is no more work to be done here, you just have to apply the icon to what you want, in our case it's the Wii SD card. Outside of any prgram just find the file you just saved, and right-click it to pull up "Get Info" and a screen will come up, if you don't have right-click enabled, then click it once and hit "Command+I" and it will pop up. Do the same thing to the "untitled" media icon on your desktop. On the Custom Icon info screen go to the top left of it where it shows the mini-icon click it once, press "Command+C" (copy). Now Go to the same spot on the "untitled" info screen, and click once and press "Command+V" (paste) - your all done! well, within this screen you can also take the opportunity to rename "untitled" to "Wii SD". Whenever you insert this SD card to the Mac, you will have this new killer icon cheers

And WHY would anyone connect the SD Card from the Wii to the computer? well aside from backing up saved data, and downloading things like game saves (if you are lame like that), you can also transport all your Animal Crossing photos to your Opera galleries!

Forum Post 1000Anton Theme: 2 Złoty