Iconifer 2.0

The Iconifer widget requires you to drag and drop an icon on its front face.
On its back side, Iconifer asks you to enter the install location for ImageMagick and to choose a size for the algorithm.

You can drop any number of images (512×512 pixels, preferably larger) onto the widget to have them automatically converted into the desired formats and sizes.

The iOS setting will create images for the iTunes store, the iPhone 4 (and other retina displays such as the newer iPod Touch), iPad, and iPhone (along with older touch screens such as the first few iPod Touch models), saving out the files with suffixes indicating their resolution (512, 114, 72, and 57).

The Mac setting generates a full ICNS file containing all necessary sizes (512×512, 256×256, 128×128, 32×32, and 16×16), similar to the Windows setting, which creates an ICO containing the standard sizes for Windows Vista and Windows 7 (256×256, 48×48, 32×32, 24×24, 16×16). You can also automatically generate all of the above in one simple action!

When creating icons, the original image is sharped before scaling to increase apparent crispness (especially for 512×512 and 256×256 sized icons), but this can easily be turned off by entering a value of 0 in the amount setting (found in the widget preferences). Sharpening is only applied before 512×512 and 256×256 scaling, to prevent aliasing of details at smaller sizes.

Further tuning of the apparent crispness can be handled using specific scaling algorithms, which are also customised on the preferences side of the widget. For iOS icons, the Catrom method is suggested as a good balance between accuracy, sharpness, and smoothness.

To generate ICNS and ICO files, Iconifer first creates scaled PNG files, builds the icons, then removes the temporary PNG files. To prevent accidental data loss in the unforeseen event of mass file removal (shouldn’t ever happen, but hey, weird things do occur sometimes), temporary files are not actually deleted, but simply moved to the trash.

While Iconifer always supports full alpha data, when creating icons for the iOS platform no transparency or alpha should be included in the original files, otherwise visual errors will occur when submitting to the app store.

In this case Apple’s rounded corners are automatically added, so no transparency or alpha is needed, and will actually cause black and white boxes to appear in some cases.

Note Iconifer is cross-platform and it works on iOS (iTunes store, iPhone 4, iPad, iPhone), Mac OS X (with 512X512 ICNS) and Windows (256×256 ICO).

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· User interface overhaul