Can Combine Icons... Need I Say More?

very good
key review info
application features
  • Custom folders for your applications or documents.
  • (4 more, see all...)

Icons have always been an important part of the Mac desktop. I remember the days when I would sift through hundreds of icons to find just the right ones to match my desktop and folder contents. Come to think of it that was last week... Yes I am still very much in love with icons, and laugh the devil's laugh when some of my non-mac-using friends mention the 128x128 icons that they can't have on their desktop without having them absolutely everywhere else.

At any rate, although I love icons, I have never had the necessary knowledge, skill or artistic aptitude to make one. It's the worst when you only need something small, like a folder for your documents for one firm or site, and would only like a folder with a little badge of the firm's or site's logo. To help you out and give you everything you need to customize icons, the nice people at Infinity-to-the-Power-of-Infinity have made Can Combine Icons.

Can Combine Icons? Yes, Can Combine Icons is a program that, like its name implies, combines icons.

Working with it is highly intuitive, you are shown a column with three wells. The top one is the 'folder' well, from which the base or background of the icon that will be created is taken. The one below is the 'symbol' well, from which the badge or distinctive element is taken. The third is the result. This might sound more complex or confusing than it is. If you have ever seen those icons that had a folder with some sort of other image on its cover then you already have the perfect example of what can be made with Can Combine Icons.

Working with it After dragging the desired folder and symbol icons into their respective wells, you are pretty much ready to go. I will note that the program will only allow you to drag icons into the well, meaning that no matter what kind of file you drag in there, only the icon of that file will go into the well. This means that you can drag any Word document for example and have the word icon automatically appear in the well.

To any other type of image just copy it and paste it via the two hot keys into one of the wells. At this point you will be greeted by a crop window of sorts. You can resize the image and pan it around in order to fin your desired 128x128 area. A friendly word of warning, leave the rotate alone. Although it lets you rotate the image, what will be present in the well at the operation will not be rotated, and if you do mess with the rotate, whatever reaches the well will have nothing to do with what you were seeing in the preview window. Try it, see for yourself, and then leave it alone.

Your last option for getting icons into the wells is pressing on the little folder icon, the one in the small group of three icons in the middle left of the window. This will bring up the library where the program has, by default, most of the icons used by the system for icons. You can add your own icons and build your own categories and 'browse' an application, meaning that you open it and extract the icons for it and all files icons it can save or assign.

Once you have the two icons in place, you can proceed of messing and mucking about with them to your heart's desire. This is best approached by pressing the second button, the one below the library to have two drawers pop up. These drawers, one for each of the two wells, are split into three tabs. Under the first tab, Position, you can change the vertical and horizontal placement of the icon in the final result. While the rotate tool is very well designed with the no-rotation center, the two axis sliders have no such option. The second tab, dubbed Effects, lets you change the opacity of the icon, apply a color overlay and give it a drop shadow. The last tab, suggestively named Size, houses one big slider for changing the size of the icon. There is a link tabs option in the menu that makes it so whenever you change a tab in one drawer, it is automatically changed in the other too.

Patterns? This is one of the weirder name choices in this application. The word pattern is used to describe built in presets for positions and effect for the 'symbol' icon. Some of these are totally useless, except for saving the maybe 30 seconds it would take you to scrub two sliders, but some are excellent. You will be primarily interested in the last three submenus: Misc, 3D Compositions and Special uses. These contain presets that make it easy to place icons on the covers of folders, on plug-in cubes or on hard drive icons.

The Good Makes it incredibly easy to combine icons in order to add some diversity or better categorize files. The presets, although dubiously named, make it a snap to obtain great looking results without any work.

The Bad Has a very bad choice of words for common things like presets. The rotate does not work as advertised in the paste preview window. And the overlay first transforms the icon into grayscale.

The Truth One of the better icon customizers out there. It delivers some of the best results with minimal work. Sure it is a little weird but once you get over the initial strangeness it works like a charm.

Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:

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user interface 3
features 4
ease of use 5
pricing / value 4


final rating 4
Editor's review
very good
 
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