Flat Byword Icon for Yosemite
Since upgrading to Yosemite, I’ve been loving the new design and the flat icons. However, the few old-school icons left on my dock are now a complete eye sore by comparison. Since the Byword icon is staring back at me most of the work day I decided to go in update it.
♫♪ one of these things is not like the other… ♪♫
Before and after… My OCD brain is no longer screaming at me.
I really liked the way Atom, and Instacast updated their icons for Yosemite (matching iTunes and other native apps), so I decided to emulate the same look with the white border and a slight gradient.
Updating the Icon
To use this icon, simply download it here, then find your Byword app, select Get Info (⌘I), and drag the Byword.icns file into the icon in the upper left corner of the info pane:
Note: a lot of icon tutorials tell you to go into the .app file’s resources and replace the default icon within the application itself. This will not work with Mac App Store apps like Byword because they sign their code and any change to the package’s contents will require a new signature. Using the “Get Info” method is the only way to do this.
You may need to killall Dock before the new icon will show up for you.
Rounded Yosemite Icon Template
If you want to create your own rounded Yosemite-style icon like this one, you can download the PSD file here.
The process is pretty simple. Essentially you’ll need to export versions of your icon as png images ranging from 16x16 @ 72ppi to 512x512 @ 144ppi (which is actually 1024x1024), then run a command to compile them all into an icon. If you have Xcode installed on your system, it comes bundled with the iconutil command needed to turn your image into an icns file.
There’s a nice tutorial at davenelson.com explaining how to do all of this.
Enjoy!