A proper Aqua style Opera icon

A proper Aqua style Opera icon

One of the longstanding issues for Opera on the Mac is the decidedly unmaclike icon, with terrible nonconforming shadows, lame gradients and an issue of misproportioned space all around the icon. I've seen a few attempts to make custom ones but they have always been kinda crappy and never quite good enough for OS X.

My friend, Sammybeany is better at shiny graphics things than I am, and through a night or two of tweaking and testing and enduring my complaints and criticism, he finally turned out a pretty great Opera icon that I think you should all try out if the current eyesore is bothering you as it sits all day in that dock.

It went through some evolution.. you can see my halfhearted attempt at making one on the left, and an older less refined version of Sammy's in the middle, with the final new one on the right (some usage examples at the bottom.)



If you want to download it, click this link and save it to your computer. If you right click the Opera application in Finder, and go to "Show Package Contents", then Contents, then Resources, and then drag the new Opera.icns to replace the old one, the icon will show next time you restart Opera. You'll need to do this every time you upgrade Opera, but it's worth it.

Any comments or criticism are great. I personally really like this icon and think it's what Opera should be providing with the OS X port instead of their awkward logo.

Aqua style and no retarded shadow at the left. Yay perfect!

Is great and beautiful, anyway...I'm windows XP user 80% of the time.

Beautiful!

Super!

I like it very much!

Spiffy!

Very good.

Hello!

I'm surprised to see this has garnered such a positive response. Thanks for all the support!

SuitCase and I threw together an Opera documents icon last night to accompany the application icon. You can grab it here.

Installation of this icon is pretty much the same procedure as the other one. Just overwrite the old file with the new one. It will show up inside Opera once you restart the application, but it might be stubborn about appearing in other places. I imagine it will show up everywhere else automatically once you restart OS X, but I'm not positive.

If you have any other comments, questions, suggestions or critisms don't hesitate to let me know.

Oh, also, for the record . . . I feel kind of silly saying this, but in case anyone is wondering or concerned, I waive any copyright or ownership of these icons. Feel free to do whatever you like with them or to them. I very greatly doubt Opera would ever include them officially in the Mac version, but if it ever came to that I'd be honored and have no problem with it.

Welcome to the Forums and thank you for sharing this extremely nice work with us!

I repacked the icons so they can be used on Windows as well. Full credit goes to the creator of these very nice icons, Sammybeany, of course.
opera.ico

Much better! Thanks!

1) Make sure Opera isn't running when you replace these files

2) If you have Opera in the dock, you might have to drag it off and then relaunch it to get the new icon to appear.

Thanks for the icon. I'm not sure it's 100% "there" but it's 100% better than the old one!

Originally posted by larskl:

I repacked the icons so they can be used on Windows as well. Full credit goes to the creator of these very nice icons, Sammybeany, of course.
opera.ico

I see someone beat me to it...

What did you use to convert it? I used AhaView, but it's not free, and I don't intend on keeping it past the 30-day trial period.

Lovely - thanks a lot! This is one big improvement over the old one.

Great! Though I'm not the biggest fan of the classic Aqua look, my contempt for the existing mess of an icon means it is vastly preferable.

Why doesn't Mac Opera support opera:config#UserPrefs|ApplicationIcon? grrrr!

Originally posted by non-troppo:

Why doesn't Mac Opera support opera:config#UserPrefs|ApplicationIcon? grrrr!

That's a good question. Linux doesn't have that option either.

Vista WOW? The new aqua Opera icons WOW!

Muchos gracias, they look great!

Hey cool, the thread got on Opera Watch.

Does this icon really look good in Vista? The styles are similar but overall I'd have thought this one was too glossy for Vista's design. Is the light sourcing\shadowing etc correct?

Originally posted by GT500:

What did you use to convert it? I used AhaView, but it's not free, and I don't intend on keeping it past the 30-day trial period.

I just extracted the icons from it as png (works in almost any image view/editor, I used XnView) and repacked it with Icon Sushi

Originally posted by luomat:

Thanks for the icon. I'm not sure it's 100% "there" but it's 100% better than the old one!

No problem, I'm glad you like it. Any suggestions for how you think it could be better? Even down to tiny little details . . . be as picky as you want. I'm open to making changes if you see something that could be improved.

you asked me to be picky, so here we go
in the 16*16 version the alpha transparency isn't perfect yet, causing visible pixels. maybe you could try to do some finetuning there.
also it uses 15 px in height only, of those 14 px are really visible.
and in the small version (not in the other ones) the top and bottom parts could be a little bit thicker
just have a look at the attached screenshot, i tried to illustrate it there

I must say I really like this icon! Good work!

Untitled.png

Haha, interesting. That's not the sort of thing I was expecting, but it's also something I hadn't really considered or noticed. I just let Apple's Icon Composer utility handle the smaller scaled versions without really giving them a second look. As it happens, trying to import a 16 x 16 icon into said utility without letting it automatically scale it on its own seems to yeild some sort of bizarre bug where the alpha channel is screwed up and displays blue artifacts around the image. I figured your complaint would be a simple thing to address, but boy was I wrong! I spent, like, an hour wrestling with the stupid Icon Composer. Stupid Apple dev tools. Oh well.



How does this look to you? I think I addressed everything you mentioned, but let me know if there's anything else you notice wrong with it. If you're cool with it I'll go ahead and update the .icns file. Give it a thorough look and let me know what you think.

This one made me clean up my dock so that there's more space for bigger icons!

Good job.
One of those things on a long list, which nobody gets done.

Perhaps, the stats for Opera on Mac OS X would have looked better if in fact Opera worked better with Mac OS X.
An Icon, probably isn't going to do it, but it is a start.

What about:

• pref. style
• skin
• keychain
• contacts
• bookmarks
  

How does this look to you? I think I addressed everything you mentioned, but let me know if there's anything else you notice wrong with it. If you're cool with it I'll go ahead and update the .icns file. Give it a thorough look and let me know what you think.

That's better, but you add 2 ugly pixel at the bottom (see attached screenshot for illustration and a quick fix (just copied the color from neighbour, so i't not perfect)
Untitled - 4.png

If you want to try some further edits you could make the bottom and top (same place as marked in the image ^^) a bit thicker, but that'd be a new logo then as it'd make the O way different

Originally posted by larskl:

That's better, but you add 2 ugly pixel at the bottom (see attached screenshot for illustration and a quick fix (just copied the color from neighbour, so i't not perfect)

Ooh, what a shame! Of whom exactly was this wonderful intiative???

In other words: Thank you so MUCH! You are a true angel (proverbially speaking, of course...)

Originally posted by johannordholm:

Aqua style and no retarded shadow at the left. Yay perfect!

I agree. This is a very nice dock icon. Thanks for uploading it!

gooodie. thanks for sharing.

Beautiful, thanks

Hi SuitCase,
what is the license for this icon? CC, GPL?
I would like to use it on my Linux desktop as well - and probably on a website. Is this ok?

I didn't actually make it, Sammybeany (above) did. Far as I know he's happy for anyone to use it anywhere, though.

Why use an aqua icon on Linux, though? I thought you guys were at least pretending you cared about visual consistency nowadays..

Because *anything* is more consistent than Opera's real icon!!!

Opera icon without impress (shadow) would be like *anybody's* O

PNG version for windows docks (rocket, object, etc.), if you don't mind.
Opera.png

The icon you made did not startup when the computer was restarted so i fixed it; also, I made a matching documents icon using the same image you created.Opera.icns OperaDocs.icns OperaDocs.icns

It didn't, rossberry? What did you do to fix it? I'm confused.. it seems to work when I put it in the Opera bundle (but sometimes you need to launch it for Dock to update its cached icon, even after a reboot.

Also, there was already a document icon Sammy posted above but I guess yours can be an alternate style! Sammy's one is a centred "O" rather than in the corner, which we both figured out to be inconsistent and wrong of Opera to do.

I have been using the custom icon from here for a while now but I've recently had to reinstall Opera on my MacBook because when I had the custom icon in there, Opera was creating two instances (one with the new icon and one with the old) every time I opened it up. Pretty annoying. Not sure if anyone else has had this problem but just wanted to let you guys know that it can be a potential issue.

I don't like the official Opera mac icon but I'd rather have the old icon and a stable browser than an unstable one!

I really dont't think, that the icons has anything to do with it. Really, this is not possible. You can easily change any icon of progs, files or folders in macos without any negative effect.

I made my own version, it's practically the same as Opera's but without the shadow.
Here it is for those that are interested...
Opera.icns

That's interesting. I don't like it that much myself, but it's certainly better than the off centre mess that the standard Opera icon is.

Hi, very interesting work, but the link doesn't work. I don't know, but it shows a row of numbers and questions marks similar to a matrix.

Welcome to the Forums

I guess you mean gadz icon? It has the .icns format that's used on Mac OS X. Opera can't show that format internally and the server does not deliver a proper mime type. Instead of left clicking on it try a right (ctrl) click on the link and from the context menu choose "Save linked content as" to download it to your disk.

Is the "first shot" version still around? I like that one more.

http://horseface.org/opera.png For anyone who wants it, here it is that awful old one. PNG format, so convert it with img2icns or similar software.