I'm having a lot of trouble getting my icon working with XCode26 and Icon Composer.
<TL;DR> The icon sucks </TL:DR>
Why does it suck? 4 main issues plague me when I compare the new icon with the existing icon.
- The colors are washed out.
- I can't have a transparent background.
- The size of the icon is wrong.
- I can't use the old icon on pre-Tahoe macs. It's Tahoe or bust!
Here's a comparison between the two icons:
If I add any Liquid Glass effects to the icon, it just looks bad. Any more of a gradient behind the image makes the image fade out. Adding specular highlights just throws a ring around the upper and lower sections that doesn't seem to fulfill any purpose. Blur doesn't seem to do anything. And I can't get rid of the background at all. It must be there.
The biggest problem is the size. The new icon doesn't just look smaller, it is smaller! I measured the width and the new icon is 19.5% smaller. I did this by setting the finder view to 128x128, grabbing the screen shot, and using Acorn to measure the width from the left red edge to the right blue edge. The icns file is 256 pixels across which makes sense as I'm on a 4K monitor at 2x resolution. The icon file is 206 pixels. Doing the same with the finder set to 256x256 shows the same reduction.
When I look at Icon Composer, it's showing me that the icon is fitting in perfectly with the guidelines. The graphic artist I hired years ago did a great job!
So somehow there is a border being added to the icon file that shrinks the image down, and I can't get rid of it nor make the icon bigger. So I'm stuck.
I've tried the various tricks to get both the icns and icon files to be added to the build such that pre-Tahoe macs see the old icon, and it either breaks on Tahoe or breaks on the pre-Tahoe. I can't get both.
I don't think there's a solution to this, I'm just documenting my frustrations. The Mac was fine before this, why change something that works?
