10.6 Snow Leopard Feature: Icons – Some look bad

With Apple’s release of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, the maximum size of icons in application has been increased to 512 pixels by 512 pixels from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard’s 128 x 128 pixel icons.

Now, most would think ‘Who cares about icons’? Well, actually quite a few people notice. If you hit command-tab with any of the Apple applications running you might notice how nice of an icon that each of the icons display. There is one exception, which surprises me; iTunes.

iTunes does not have a 512 x 512 pixel image. I’m not entirely sure why this would be the case nor the reasoning behind the icon not being updated, despite iTunes just being updated to version 9.1 less than a week ago. The only possible reason might be because Windows can only support 72 x 72 pixels in terms of icons. But then one would question why Apple wouldn’t want to use a higher resolution icon in their Mac OS X version of iTunes. A better operating system must deserve a better icon, right?

Why the OS X version of iTunes does not have a nicer icon is just baffling. I mean even iPhoto ’06 has a decent icon and the software is 3 years old already.

There are also some other applications that have bad icons. So far I have only found two others.

• Cyberduck

• Utorrent, including the icon for utorrent files.

All of the bad examples are below:

It’s not like Snow Leopard just happened to be sprung on everybody with no notice what-so-ever. Developers had well over a year to update icons, even if for no other reason future proofing their software. Maybe it only annoys me, but alas it is annoying to have to look at the icon and see such pixelation.