OSX 10.9.5 not showing image file

[mvlanc...@gmail.com]

Good Ukelele People,

I see that the .icns files from Ukelele do appear in System Preferences properly.  I am now trying to create a custom image for my keyboard layout.  I found that if I take one of the working Ukelele .icns files, open it in Preview, then save it with Preview, the resulting image does *not* appear in System Preferences.

That is, without me making changes to the image, Preview processing it and resaving it is changing something and causing it to be incompatible with System Preferences.  Any ideas?  GIMP won't even open .icns files.  I confirmed this is not a file permissions issue.  Opening the files in a text editor confirms that Preview has significantly altered the contents (but it looks like hexdump or compiled code, so it's not intelligible)

Thank you in advance for your help in the matter,

Matt

[Geke]

.icns files are not pictures, they are special collections of pictures and Preview obviously doesn’t handle them properly.

What you need is to first create pictures for the various sizes of the keyboard icon (with any program) then use Apple’s Icon Composer application to bundle them all together in a .icns file.
In practice, you need not fill all the different slots—just the 16x16 one is enough to get the menu bar icon.

On my Mac with Snow Leopard, Icon Composer is in the folder [hard disk] / Developer / Applications / Utilities, but it seems later OS versions don’t come with it installed and Apple now wants you to download it from their (walled) Developers Download area. I can send you my copy, it’s tiny, but it may not work in 10.9.

[Sorin Paliga]

Preview does not work here, install a small app like Img2icns or Icon Converter, both free, which immediately converts any image file (jpg, png, tiff…) to an icns file. This will work.

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[mvlanc...@gmail.com]

Thanks!  I found Icon Composer on the apple developer website, and it worked, with the exception that it made all the images slightly darker, just like Preview.

In case anyone is interested, I have attached the files for my Colemak - Qwerty keyboard to this reply.  You can also find it on my website, http://code.instructorium.com/colemak-qwerty/

[mvlanc...@gmail.com]

[Geke]

Good work, Pulcinella!

The change in colours may have happened because of the very limited palette used for the small menu icon.

Your site looks good. Regarding the keyboard, maybe you might like to create a bundle? There’s a command for that in Ukelele: associate the layout with an .icns file, then save it as a bundle. I think that that is even necessary to have it working fully with the latest OS X.

Best,