With the release of Parallels 2.5 (and 3.0 now for that matter), I found myself in need of icons to replace the ugly Windows ones that would pop up in my dock when I ran a windows program. So I searched the regular places for icons, but often found images (jpeg, png, gif) not icons that I liked.
Therefore, on my search for a program that would convert images to icons, I happened upon FastIcns, a program that lets you drag image files into it and it will automatically let you save it as an icon of all kinds of sizes (even 512×512 for Leopard Support!). The cool thing about the program (other than the simplicity of it all), is its interface.
Once you run the program, it opens a revolving cube that you can drag images to from Finder. It’s by no means a necessary feature, but a unique interface that made me appreciate independent Mac developers, yet again.
Once you dragged an image file to the cube, double click on the cube itself to save the image as an icon. I choose the “Resource Fork” filetype and install the icon using the “Get Info” method using Macworld’s simple instructions:
- In the Finder, select the file or folder whose icon you’d like to use.
- Hit Command-I (File: Get Info).
- Click on the small icon image at the top left of the Get Info window.
- Hit Command-C (Edit: Copy).
- Close the Get Info window.
- In the Finder, select the destination file or folder for the custom icon.
- Hit Command-I to open the selection’s Get Info window.
- Click the small icon image at the top left of the Get Info window.
- Hit Command-V (Edit: Paste) to paste the custom icon.
- Close the Get Info window.
Try FastIcns out for yourself, its really quite simple and a great little too (and free to boot!). Check out the program and let me know what you think!