System 7 brought a lot of new features that give users more power: aliases, integrated file sharing, Apple events, and Publish and Subscribe. Maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise, but one of the most popular aspects of System 7 adds very little functionality but lots of fun — those colorful and customizable icons. When I recently browsed through a new edition of “BBS in a Box,” I found thousands of icons. Icons for folders, disks, applications, and documents. There are replacement icons for just about anything you can imagine — and probably some you can’t imagine.
Using these icons under System 7 is a snap. First, copy an icon from somewhere (we’ll look at sources later). Next select an item on your desktop and Get Info on it. In the Info dialog box that appears, click once on the icon, and paste. Voilá! If you later decide that you want the original icon back, just click on it (again in the Get Info dialog box) and press the Delete key. If the change isn’t immediately apparent, close the folder containing the icon and then re-open it. Occasionally a reboot is necessary — I guess some icons are just stickier than others.
You can paste a new icon onto just about any kind of Mac object, but locked documents can’t be changed. It’s up to you to exercise logic and restraint (ha!) when substituting icons; if your folders look like disks and your applications look like folders — or vice versa — you’re likely to get quite confused.
In addition to all of the public domain icons available, there are a number of applications that let you create and manage icons. We’ll look at what’s available in this article.
Sources
If you look on most local BBSs (such as MacExpress in Savannah) or on America Online, you’ll be able to find more icons than you’re likely to be able to use in a lifetime. In fact, they usually come as sets, often consisting of forty or more individual icons. They may be organized as to type: hard disk icons, floppy icons, folder icons, application icons, and document icons. Folders are the most popular. They may come in different formats. The simplest delivery system consists of empty folders with the icons already attached. With these, you can simply use the new folder as a replacement, or you can use the Copy/Paste method explained above.
Other icon sets come in Scrapbook format, and for these, the Copy/Paste method is the only way to work. The Scrapbook delivery method is less efficient, since you have to run a scrapbook DA in order to use it.
Some icons and icon sets come in ResEdit format, a method that is probably overkill for most users. If you’re a ResEdit freak, you don’t need this article anyway, since you’re used to hacking resources. Occasionally you might find an icon library in a proprietary format such as I Like Icon (discussed later), but these are relatively rare.
Roll Your Own
If you’re fairly adventuresome, you might want to try making your own icons, either from scratch or by modifying existing designs. If so, there are both PD/shareware and commercial utilities in abundance. One of the most popular is FolderIconMaker. To use it, just drag an application or document onto the FolderIconMaker icon, and a new folder will be created with a miniature icon right on it from the original application or document. This is a fast and simple way to customize your desktop, but it does not allow for any editing of the icon.
Next in line is an actual icon editor. There are several of these in the pd/shareware field. We’ll discuss IconBoss (shareware $25). To run IconBOSS, you can do one of two things: either double-click it to begin a new, untitled icon, or drag the icon of an existing file to IconBOSS to edit the family of icons associated with it. (An icon family is the set of icons that the Finder will display depending on the number of colors in use by your monitor.) There are simple MacPaint-like tools (but in color) that you can use to make your changes. When you’re finished you can either save your changes directly back to the original file or create a new icon file (which you can edit again later). The main limit of the current version (1.01) is that you cannot edit disk icons.
Icons From The Finder
The commercial product Icon7 (Inline Design, $49 street) takes the process a step further: it consists of an Extension which allows icon editing directly from the Finder’s Get Info dialog box; selecting and then double-clicking the icon brings up Icon7’s editor and provides access to a library of icons stored in the System Folder.
Icon7 is simple and direct, but there are a few places where it could stand improvement. For one thing, it provides no access to additional icons which may be imbedded within an application; only the “main” icon is available for use. It’s also somewhat awkward to build a library, since icons can only be accessed one at a time (there’s no way to select a group of icons, and there’s no provision to merge libraries). The icon libraries that come with Icon7 are limited to a few selections which are not very useful. (Where would you use an icon of an amoeba or a paramecium?) Nevertheless, Icon7 does provide a direct method of editing icons without the need to run a separate application.
What I Like About Icons
I Like Icon (Baseline, $34 street) takes a giant step forward by providing an easy way to accumulate lots of icons, edit them, and build libraries quickly, and it has lots of interesting additional features, too.
This application lets you open any disk, file, folder, application, or document and have instant access to all of the icons associated with it. To edit an icon, just double-click it. The editor has most of the standard features you would expect, but unfortunately does not have a text tool.
Building libraries is a breeze; you can drag icons from one library window to another, and a floating “Work Palette” can serve as a temporary holding area. There’s a “Folder Icons” window that allows you to combine an icon with a folder image in two sizes, thus giving the same capability as FolderIconMaker, but with more options and more control.
One final feature of I Like Icon is its ability to create animated icons, which can even include sounds. This feature sounded great at first, but the novelty soon wore off.
Working Icons
The final package we’ll look at goes beyond anything that we’ve discussed so far. In addition to a fullfeatured icon editor, Icon-It! Pro (Olduvai, $59 street) can create a floating toolbar in any application, which looks and functions very much like the toolbars in the latest versions of Microsoft Word and Excel. This palette can contain iconic buttons that serve as shortcuts to the program’s commands. Icons are certainly faster than pulling down a menu and selecting a command.
Creating an icon bar with Icon-It! Pro will take some time and some planning, but there isn’t anything terribly difficult about the process. There are many options, including the number of icons in the bar, the orientation of the bar (horizontal, vertical, or squarish), the size and shape of the individual icons (which can be anywhere from 7x7 pixels to 32x32 pixels, and may be non-square), their spacing, placement on the monitor, and other characteristics.
A large library is supplied, including icons both large and small, and colored or black/white. Also, an “Extract Icons” command lets you grab imbedded icons from outside applications. The editor has all of the expected commands and tools, although they operate somewhat sluggishly. (The lasso tool on all of the editors is disappointing.) Icons are chosen and/or edited, then given a function. Functions usually correspond to menu commands, but they may also trigger keystrokes or macros — I had good luck using Icon-It! with QuicKeys. Finally, the icon is placed on the floating menu palette, and the palette is “installed” in the desired application. Thereafter, when you run that application, the Icon-It! palette appears, with fully functional icon buttons.
While Icon-It! Pro is not marketed as a general purpose icon editor, it certainly serves that purpose. It is limited to only one library, which must be located in the System Folder. It would be much handier if multiple libraries could be stored anywhere — even offline. The library begins at around half a megabyte and can grow rapidly.
My 32 Pixels Worth
There are lots of choices for icon editing, but if you want a good, general purpose package, get a copy of I Like Icon, and then call Baseline to ask for a text tool. There are lots of great icons provided, and the feature set is rich. You can make lots of icons with the other programs, but I Like Icon makes it fun. If you like the idea of using icons as control buttons from within your programs, consider Icon-It! Pro.
Icon Tact
In the meantime, here’s a trick that lets you create custom icons without any special software. Let’s say you want to give a custom icon to one of your documents. Any kind of document will do, but let’s pretend that it’s a picture you’ve created in a paint program. Take a screen shot (Command-Shift-3) of it. Open that file (probably called Picture 1) with TeachText. You’ll notice that your cursor has become a small crosshair. Drag out a selection that includes the important areas of the screen image. Don’t worry about the size, but try to make the area approximately squarish. Choose Copy from the Edit menu. Now select the icon of the file you want to customize, and do a Get Info on it. Click once on the icon near the upper left corner of the Info box and choose Paste. The image on the Clipboard will be scaled to fit the icon area. That’s all there is to it. If you don’t like the results, just reselect an area from the TeachText document and Copy/Paste again.
