In Apple’s media hub strat­egy, games are always the under­dog. Maybe this will change with the iPhone 3G, who knows?
I’ve cre­ated a games folder and a Finder side­bar icon based on iTunes iPod Games side­bar item. Only the iTunes icon didn’t pro­vide a 512px ver­sion so I had to create it from scratch. Also there isn’t a Games folder resource icon for the user folder, so I had t create that one also. I’m happy with the result check it out:

In the Leop­ard Devel­oper Tools from Apple, there is a new ver­sion of Icon Com­poser but you could also use Icon­Builder from the Icon­fac­tory. Apple released their Res­o­lu­tion Inde­pen­dence Guide­lines for icon devel­op­ers. So it’s time to pimp those icons and use make those vec­tors hurt and those pixels scream.

Microsoft is known for ripping-​off Apple. In the new ver­sion of Win­dows Mobile 6.0 Microsoft shame­lessly copies Apple’s iSync icon in it’s user inter­face. For com­par­i­son I’ve added the orig­i­nal iSync icon.

I have been mess­ing around with the new icon format for Mac OS X 10.5 Leop­ard, enor­mous (256×256) and are-​you-​blind (512×512) just kiddin’. The high-​DPI of modern mon­i­tors have exposed prob­lems in the cur­rent inter­face. Most inter­face ele­ments are pixel based. These ele­ments are scal­able in a min­i­mal degree. But now with the modern screens with high-​resolution, the inter­face gets smaller and smaller, includ­ing the icons. Com­puter com­pa­nies resolved this by enlarg­ing their icons. Microsoft chooses the vector-​way (Win­dows Pre­sen­ta­tion Foun­da­tion), Apple the pixel-​pdf-​way (Aqua). Both have their pros and cons. Rich pixel based icons tend to get rather large in file size, so some form of com­pres­sion has to be applied in TIFF files or ICNS files. Lucky enough I’ve always designed my icons media-​independent-​minded (OS, web, print and pack­ag­ing). A lot of pro­gram icons have to be redesigned/upgraded, so good times for icon design­ers on both platforms.

Some inter­est­ing read­ing mate­r­ial on this subject:

• Craig Hockenberry
• Jasper Hauser
• Sven-S. Porst
• Daniel Jalkut
• Christo­pher Lloyd
• Stephen Deken
• Josh Williams

iTunes 7 was released at 12 sep­tem­ber 2006 for the public. This incar­na­tion brought Cov­er­flow as a view option, movies, games and a com­plete user inter­face over­haul. Although I like Cov­er­flow view very much, it’s a real resource hog! Cov­er­flow was orig­i­nally cre­ated by Jonathan del Strother from Steel Skies. After installing I imme­di­ately noticed the blue icon (like iTunes 2). The CD icon has far more detail then the icon shows at large icon size (128×128). When you open up the 512×512 ver­sion you’ll see in the middle of the CD iTunes 7 120806 Apple 2006. Hey didn’t I say SEP­TEM­BER 12? Either the icon was fin­ished at August 12 or the prod­uct was post­poned a month? The music note has far less detail com­pared to iTunes (4-6). This has prob­a­bly some­thing to do with the new icon resources Apple’s gonna intro­duce with Leop­ard. Leop­ard will fea­ture a res­o­lu­tion inde­pen­dent inter­face. One more minor detail the iTunes 7 image is 16-bit instead of the goo’ old 8-bit.

I’ve tried to recre­ate Apple’s appli­ca­tion icon parts (pencil, brush and ruler). So far I am quite sat­is­fied with the end result.

The Icon Pack Tool­bar Mega­pack con­tains all the other icon pack­ages (Tool­bar Hard­ware, Tool­bar Appli­ca­tions and Tool­bar Fold­ers) and includes some unan­nounced icon pack­ages. This is the ulti­mate icon col­lec­tion which covers almost all your needs!