Icons App Review
I’m sure like me many of you have needed to create icons for your desktop of iOS based apps. While it’s not hard to create the necessary icons it can be time consuming when you need to generate all the different sizes to support both retina and non-retina displays.
This is where the Icons app comes in. Developed by Chris Fletcher this app allows you to very quickly and easily take your large detailed 512×512 icon artwork and turn it into icons for use in iOS Apps, Mac Apps and iTunes.
Once you have dragged your 512×512 image into Icons it gives you a realtime view of how the icon looks on the iPhone 4, iPhone and iPad. It’s not just the app icon which is generated but also spotlight and settings icons as well.
Once in the app you can then apply a number of effects such as rounding the corners, adding a glass shine effect, adding the popular OpenFient logo as well as text. You are able to select which corner of the icon you want the OpenFient icon to appear in as well as select the text’s font, colour and position.
Icons
Once you have applied your effects and got the look your after you simply hit the export icons button and all the different versions of icons are generated. It would be good to see is the ability to select which icons are exported as you won’t always need all of them added to the app as well as the ability to save an icon project so you can come back to what you are working on.
Icons is a great time saver and an easy app to use. It’s certainly one of those tools that makes it’s way quickly into your workflow removing some of the more tedious tasks you need to perform when releasing an app.
Nice work Chris.
Mike
9 Comments
Trisect Development on February 23rd, 2011
If we buy 1.3 do we get 2.0 as an free update?
chrs944 on February 23rd, 2011
Definitely
Trisect Development on February 23rd, 2011
Okay sold!
Creating icons for iOS « Dinosaurs with Laserz on February 26th, 2011
[...] Updated February 26 2011: Chris Fletcher’s Icons app for the desktop not only outputs your icons at the correct sizes, it allows you to painlessly add rounded corners, glass effect, the Openfeint logo and text. At time of writing version 2 is just about to drop. Version 1 is on sale until it’s released. Thanks 72squred.com for the tip [...]
ZeCreator on March 3rd, 2011
Do not work: there is a bug when opening a PNG image from 512 to 512 it appears with a mosaic effect in the application window (that display 25 tiny images instead of my 512px image). An update soon please! (i have buy the version 2).
Thanks.
chrs944 on March 3rd, 2011
ZeCreator,
I have an update that I am almost ready to push out. For now please make sure that your images that you are working with are 72 ppi. A higher ppi will cause your images to appear smaller and are therefore tiled.
Chris
ZeCreator on March 3rd, 2011
Well done chris, that is the problem.
Thanks.
Ian Adams on March 29th, 2011
Thanks for the tip! It’s now my very first Mac App Store purchase. :)
I tried looking for ParticleDesigner and GlyphDesigner on the Mac App Store, though, and found nothing. Are they not on there?
chrs944 on February 21st, 2011
Thanks for the review Mike, much appreciated. I am working on the next release of Icons which will allow even more customization but follow the same quick and simple workflow.