Iconoclast

[bcholmes]

Gah! Can someone explain Mac icons to me? Mac has this tool called Icon Composer, which I think I understand. It takes a few different sizes of icons (in some image format) and bundles them up into an icns file. That much is clear to me. I kinda like the .icns files; they're simple and easy to understand.

Then there are these other icon things that I find here and there. On "free icons" websites. These icons don't seem to be .icns files. They can't be opened using the Icon Composer, and they can't be chosen when I'm using the Jar Bundler tool. But in all other respects, they seem to behave like icons. What gives?

Comments

[browse.livejournal.com]

Can you point me to an example of one of these "non-icns" icon files? Let me take a look and see if I can figure them out.

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

Over here:

http://iconfactory.com/freeware/preview/bsg3

These are freely downloadable icons. I can look at them, but I can't figure out how to use them.

[browse.livejournal.com]

What's happened is simply that the creator of these icons forgot to give it the ".icns" extension. Rename them to have that extension and they work just fine.

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... okay, I tried that. When I try to open them using Icon Browser, I get "Bad icns file. The file header does not have the right information to be an 'icns' file."

When I try to open it using the Icon Composer, I can "the document (name) could not be opened."