Two app icons for Big Sur

Targets macOS
21

A Big Sur icon for sure looks quite odd on High Sierra. Even if Big Sur is iOssified I don’t want to see that on High Sierra to Catalina.

1 Like
22

You and a lot of other people, in other places I hang out, Mac Devs are trying to crack this too.

I have heard that in Xcode it doesn’t actually let you add two Mac app icons… Imma try to find someone in Apple whom I can talk too. I need some more information.

23

I find it interesting that the HIG says this:

Don’t provide app icons in ICNS or JPEG format. The ICNS format doesn’t support features like wide color gamut or deliver the performance and efficiency you get when you use asset catalogs. JPEG doesn’t support transparency through alpha channels, and its compression can blur or distort an icon’s images. For best results, add deinterlaced PNG files to the app icon fields of your Xcode project’s asset catalog.

24

Got it…

I’ll throw a prototype together over the weekend.

1 Like
25

A big stinking pile of failure.

  1. :white_check_mark: Read the assests.car file in a way I can compare attributes.
  2. :white_check_mark: Create a assets.car file without Xcode which matches the attributes that I can from the Contacts assests.car file, and contains multiple app icons.
  3. :white_check_mark: Use an assets.car file with Xojo and still get an icon.
  4. :x: Enjoy two icons on my application.
  5. :x: Use the Assets file from Contacts.
  6. :white_check_mark: Use the plist and assests file from Contacts.
  7. :x: Repeat step 6, but change bundle identifier.
  8. :white_check_mark: Use a “com.apple.<whateva/>” bundle id.
  9. :x: Use the assets.car file I created.

So it needs a “com.apple” bundle identifier and there’s obviously something it doesn’t like in my generated assets.car, which I cannot see.

26

You can stick a WG PNG in a ICNS file if you want, Apple’s tools will re-compress to an 8-Bit PNG 1. Asset Catalogues are meta data rich, so I guess they mean you can have multiple app icons and specify one for P3 displays (maybe even one for Dark mode)

1 My tools also re-compress to 8-Bit.

IMHO ICNS format is structured well enough for speed.

Once upon a time, Apple supported JP2K in their ICNS files.

From what I’ve learned about Asset Catalogues in the last few days, I guess Apple want to go that route because of the meta data allows resource diversion via multiple parameters.

Well… I couldn’t get it to work anyway :frowning: