Artist: Icons Creation

[iefan]

I could an icon for my Dice Rolling program. Something like a d20. If anyone is bored and need something to do... I cannot offer you any money since I'm not making any, but I'd be happy to credit you in the program.

My art is with words and structures and algorithms. :)

[erazorhead]

http://www.scumbly.com/misc/D20.zip

[iefan]

http://www.scumbly.com/misc/D20.zip

Thanks! Do you think you could post that in an icns file or in an image format? I can cut and paste the image from the folder, but that really isn't the best way to bundle an icon with an application.

[MattDiamond]

If you drag his folder onto the developer tool icon2icns you will get an icns file. Then you can open it with icns Browser (for instance) and see Jesse's lovely image and mask. He didn't make lots of different sizes for this one but it looks like it scales well and doesn't need them.

Jesse has saved my own icon-impaired butt twice in the past. Kudos to him!

[erazorhead]

http://www.scumbly.com/misc/D20_Icon_File.zip (replaces previous link)

You're right that I didn't have time to make 32x32, 16x16, etc. sizes for this icon, but i think it scales pretty well. (Obviously if I was doing this for money or something I would go the whole nine yards.)

Heya, Matt!

[iefan]

If you drag his folder onto the developer tool icon2icns you will get an icns file. Then you can open it with icns Browser (for instance) and see Jesse's lovely image and mask.

I didn't know about this tool, so I had to track it down. If anyone searches the forum in the future, it's located at: http://www.ittpoi.com/icon2icns/

You're right that I didn't have time to make 32x32, 16x16, etc. sizes for this icon, but i think it scales pretty well.

Thanks, it looks like it would scale well, but I couldn't figure out how to get to the icon from the resource fork. I was trying out the tools to extract the resource fork, but once I got that far I didn't know where to go from there. The ._Icon? File isn't just an .icns file. Thanks a lot.

[erazorhead]

i guess i don't really know all about how icons work. if it were my program i would have just copy-pasted the icon, but that is not as good for some reason?

don't know if it's helpful, but iconographer (and probably any icon program) has a menu selection to "Save icon into file..." which will put your icon into whatever file/folder/app you want

feel free to enlighten me and/or let me know how i can help here

[iefan]

i guess i don't really know all about how icons work. if it were my program i would have just copy-pasted the icon, but that is not as good for some reason?

Cutting and pasting the icon onto the folder via finder works for when you are moving it around finder, however if you go to the about box it doesn't display the correct icon. Also the icon is part of the resource fork and not a real file, so sometimes you might loose it if it's not transferred correctly. Lastly, having the four different sizes allows the image to scale a lot better. Officially, Apple says it's better to use icns because they are cached in a better way and faster to access. I don't know that the difference would be noticeable, but they did engineer the system. I'd assume they know best.

Icon Services provides icon data to multiple Mac OS clients, including the Finder, extensions and applications. Using Icon Services to obtain icon data means you can provide efficient icon caching and release memory when you don’t need icon data any longer. Icon Services provides the appropriate icon for any file object (file, folder, or volume), as well as other commonly used icons such as caution, note, or help icons in alert boxes, for example. The icons provided by Icon Services support a much larger palette of colors: up to 24 bits per pixel and an eight-bit mask. Icons are Appearance-compliant and appropriate to the active theme.
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/Icon_Service_nd_Utilities/index.html

Now this is just my take on it. Is it really better to use icns? I'm not sure, but I don't have to copy and paste every time I do a clean then build.

[iefan]

feel free to enlighten me and/or let me know how i can help here
Yeah, it works fine now, you can check it out: http://homepage.mac.com/iefan/files/DiceRoller-1.0.3.zip

If you goto Dice Roller->About Dice Roller you'll even see the icon there. Once I was about to extra the icon via icon2icns it was trivial to cut and paste it into Icon Composer and build the full .icns file. (Which you can see inside the bundle.)

[erazorhead]

and thanks for the tip of the hat in the About box - i appreciate that. glad to help.