On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 2:39 PM, Jens Alfke <j...@mooseyard.com> wrote:

>
> On Jun 3, 2010, at 10:01 PM, Shane wrote:
>
> > I'm going to have some icons made for my app, and I'm wondering to
> > what size they should be made.
>
> For app and document icons: 512x512 is the maximum icon size on 10.6. If
> you make an icon smaller than that, it will show up pixelated and blurry in
> the Finder (or QuickLook) if someone’s viewing it at a higher size.
>
> Toolbar icons are 32x32. The user can choose a small-icon view of the
> toolbar that programmatically shrinks the icons to 24x24; I don’t know if
> it’s even possible to provide custom 24x24 icons. The results look OK
> anyway.
>
> Button icons … this depends on what size you make the control. In IB you
> can look at the layout rect (not the frame rect) in the size inspector to
> see the dimensions of the content. If the button isn’t showing any text, the
> icon will fill those dimensions (assuming they’re square). NSButton will
> shrink larger images to fit in the layout rect, so it doesn’t matter if you
> make the icon larger than necessary. In fact, it might be a good idea,
> because...
>
> Keep in mind that Apple has been threatening for years to make the UI fully
> resolution-independent, presumably when it releases some kick-ass high-DPI
> displays. At that point device pixels will become smaller than the “pixel”
> units used in AppKit APIs, so larger icon sizes might be used to draw the
> icons at higher resolution than the default “72dpi”. For example, if you
> provided 64x64 icons for toolbars, and the user had a double-resolution
> display, the toolbar icons would be drawn at the same size but in higher
> resolution using the full 64 pixels.
>
> And of course you can do an end-run around the whole resolution issue by
> using vector artwork for icons. AppKit will render icons in .pdf format just
> fine, and a lot of the system icons use that already.


Additionally, if you're new to Mac OS X, you may not realize that an NSImage
can contain artwork at multiple pixel sizes.

Open up /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/Resources/Edit.icns and you'll
see that the TextEdit icon has been specifically drawn at four sizes.

TIFF and ICNS files can pack multiple bitmaps together.

-Ken
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