September 2004
Intermediate to advanced
304 pages
9h 26m
English
Content preview from Modding Mac OS XBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Creating Custom Icons
If you can draw, you can create icons. Mac OS X’s icons are little more than full-color images stored at multiple sizes. This is not to say that Apple doesn’t provide numerous guidelines in the HIG regarding the proper design of icons. They do. But when push comes to shove, icons are nothing more than well-designed images.
The basic steps for creating simple icons are listed here. The sections that follow discuss each step in further detail.
Using the image editor of your choice, design a new 128 x 128-pixel image. The image editor must support alpha channels to allow for transparency and translucency in your image. Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements can handle alpha channels.
Save the image using transparency, using either TIFF or PSD format. Make sure to preserve the transparency information.
Convert the image into a series of scaled images and masks. This is accomplished by using the Image Composer (/Developer/Applications/Utilities), which is part of the Xcode Tools. Image Composer transforms your image into a multi-size format, and uses the image’s alpha channel information to build its masks. Drag and drop within the program to produce images and masks at several standard sizes.
Designing icons
You can take two approaches when designing your own icons: either create an image from scratch, or adapt an already-existing icon image. Either way, the goal is the same: to produce a full-color 32-bit 128 x 128-pixel image with a central icon that lies on top of ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.