Icon quality on win and osx

Hi,

how does it come that icons on osx very often look much better (i'm talking about the design) than on windows? I'm really surprised by this. Also for simple tech/nerd-tools there mostly are cute icons on osx where you get some painful stuff on windows.


Regards,

taumel

Microsoft aren't artists...? :P

No, i meant more third party and also the small tools which also come from the shareware/freeware sector. FTP-Clients, Hex-Editors and so on...

Cos the developers use crap low colour icons - they could go out and buy decent icons!

But why do they do so? And independet from the colourdepth why is the design better on osx?

What Cygnus said, but apply it to the Windows-Programs?

Crap low-color icons help also with people who use Win98/Low-Resolutions, so the icon doesn't get botched in the process of being down-sampled to fit the bit-depth/icon resolution set by the system.
(where-as MacOSX is hardware accelerated and can just use the vid-card to size it down nicely no?)

I'm not convinced that it's just about the colourdepth. This surely pays a role but it's also a lot about that the idea/the theme/the design of the icons is often so much better.

Simplified question: Why is a Hexeditor Developer on OSX able to come up with a nice icon whilst a Hexeditor Developer on Win isn't able to?

Regarding the simplified question, blame the icon artist, an icon can be made to look great, just some people dont look at it as something that's worth investing time into to look great.

Also regardin the icon things, another thing to think about, MacOSX has alot of skins/themes that are pretty much inline with each other style-wise no? WinXP can get pretty different looking depending on your personal tastes, and in that sort of case, I'd prefer neutral-simple looking icons over colorful fancy/smooth-as-butter/shiny/glassy ones.

Doesn't OSX have scalable vector-based icons? I know you can scale the size in realtime and it all looks perfectly smooth.

Since they're made of vectors, all the graphics are computed so you're likely seeing lots of smooth gradients and such, which are much cleaner than some hand-drawn pixel art windows rubbish.

@Genexi2
Well, if you just care a little bit then it's easy to get some information about how to make some nicer stuff...one search in google: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwxp/html/winxpicons.asp

Don't get me wrong i don't wanna bitch around but i still don't understand then why the osx developer cares and why the win developer doesn't...

@AngelDaniel
Nope this will be a Vista feature. OSX scales just larger icons, actually they'll increase the size furthermore for leopard when i've read true things.

I'll tell you why.

Cos Mac users are artists / designers and the OS always had a slick look so the icon designers followed suit.

MS people on the other hand started with crap and got used to it from a long time back.

Maybe also people on the PC aren't using icons with an 8 bit transparency layer.

Apple is all about design. I guess it smears of on people making apps for the Mac too, so they make an effort to make icons that look nice.

Of course, it helps that the icons can be 128x128pixels 24bit color and 8bit alpha, and that OSX (xcode) comes with a nice tool for converting your pictures to icons.

Ragnar

By the way: Which tool would you recommend for doing icons on OSX?
Found these... http://interfacelift.com/icons-mac/software.php

I actually prefer more generic icons for my tools and apps and think a restricted pallet and uniform look that fits in with everything else is more important for a general purpose app, GUI etc.

Is there a free alternative to create icons on osx via an photoshop exporter?

/Developer/Applications/Utitlities/Icon Composer (comes with Xcode).

It's not directly via Photoshop, but it's a quick an easy drop and drag away once you've created the graphics in Photoshop/GIMP/Seashore/ArtRage/IInkscape etc.

Or were you thinking of a tool to create the icon graphics themselves?

Ragnar

I'm looking for a workflow like this:

a) Create the icon graphic (render, photoshop, shout at the computer,... ;O)
b) Convert the gfx into icon formats for win and osx while keeping already leopard and vista in mind
c) apply the icon ressources to the executable

Step a is done by me
Step b and c is done by one tool (just drag&drop the three components)

Ideally a gamedev tool would do all this for me whilst i only provide a texture to it.