OS27 icons

[realhackcraft]

Since OS27 made changes to the icons, I thought I'd refresh the icons. My understanding of icon composer also improved, so they look a bit better on OS26 as well.

I think you could take out the light and dark mode from the in-app menu, since that can be handled by the OS (if you use the .icon file in XCode, as they suggested). I've tweaked the dark mode look in the .icon file as well. And I believe that it should default to bordered on macOS, and unbordered everywhere else. I agree with #201 but still want to keep the border on macOS as an homage to old school Terminal.app and Ghostty.

MacOS

OS26

I can only do screen grabs of this one. This is how it would render on OS26 devices.

I personally find the borders of these a little too round, and I can fix that if you feel the need. This is behaviour ONLY on OS26 though, and they're not too noticeable.

rootshell 27.zip

iOS

OS26

I can only do screen grabs of this one. This is how it would render on OS26 devices.

rootshell 27 borderless.zip

WatchOS (just in case)

OS26:

[realhackcraft]

And it would look better if you could give me the raw SVG file of the centre element (without bevels), since I was only able to get bitmap versions of them. I think the ugly black outline around the horizontal bars is caused by this, though they don't appear in low-res.

[realhackcraft]

I went ahead and made OS26 variants anyways. It's up to you if you feel like implementing these.

rootshell 26.zip

rootshell 26 borderless.zip

[kitknox]

Thanks for putting these together. I’ll have to go back and see if I had made SVGs, but I think I just have the PNGs. The black artifact is weird as it’s not visible in Icon Composer. The problem is that for internal rendering in the app and for the macOS alternate icons I have to use the flattened PNGs directly, which is also why each icon further amplifies the bundle size even if the base Icon Composer file is small and all SVG based. I was hoping for some API improvements in the 27 releases, but don’t see anything either.

[realhackcraft]

Those are real problems. I think it is fine to just replace the existing icons with these new renders then.

for the macOS alternate icons I have to use the flattened PNGs directly

We can bundle a few icons, such as the default, the borderless, and the original, with all other variants available from a link to a MD file in this repo, where they can download the icons. The MD file can then have instructions on how to do so.

My impression of macOS icon-replacing users is that they have an icon pack that they want to use already, so those who really want the built-in alternates are rare (IMO, I don't actually know if there's anyone who really cares about official variants).

For this approach, with regards to the in-app preview, I believe that Sparkle does something similar where it is able to pull the current app icon, in its new update detected view.

[kitknox]

For now I am currently maintaining a sandboxed Mac App Store variant, but it is currently only available in TestFlight. On the standalone version I leverage the trick which makes the app icon persist even when not running. The sandboxed version flips to the old variant, and cannot be changed by the user either. Apple really needs to sort this out.

But it seems not a priority. One reason I’m even keeping the app store variant around is that it is the only path to having the API access for the VPN feature without re-writing on older APIs with a separate daemon that runs as root.

If you are bored, the visionOS 3 layer icon set needs some love. There is no Icon Composer support at all there either.

[realhackcraft]

It definitely is sad to see that Apple hasn't quite found what they want to do with the icons. VisionOS, the thing that kicked off the Tahoe redesign, is getting left behind in terms of icon tooling (tvOS too). And honestly Apple should provide an API for alternate app icons that they can review upfront, so they can open up to devs changing the app icon without fearing impersonation.

cannot be changed by the user either

Are you sure this is the case? I've just checked with a sandboxed MAS app, and it worked fine.

BTW, this is the method I was referring to: https://www.digitalminimalist.com/blog/how-to-change-mac-icons

Also, just out of curiosity, do you think it’s possible to get RS on something like the Apple Watch?

[kitknox]

I tried moving to SVG as well as the latest beta2 variant of Icon Composer and the PNG exports still have the weird artifacts in them.

[realhackcraft]

I’ve created an Apple forum discussion here: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/835957

[realhackcraft]

I made slight changes.

After thinking for a bit, we don't need a specific OS26 version, because all devices that could've been on OS26 can all update, and the overly rounded edge is not very noticeable at the small scale.

For some reason I can't attach files right now.

https://limewire.com/d/v8Vtp#ttgCBJv6JW