Fix App Icons Macro

Apple’s decided that app icons should look like white squircles with a tiny icon in them for some reason known only to Apple management.

This is bad enough on Big Sur, and Apple’s apps, but even more annoying for third party apps when you are using pre-Big Sur. And unfortunately Apple removed the ability for developers to provide two different styles of icons. So as apps like Chrome and 1Password update to squircle icons, it can be really annoying.

This macro sets the icons back - the catch being you have to acquire the old icon as an image, but as long as you can find an old Mac with the old version of the icon that is a solvable problem. As is it runs once per day, but you could run it manually or whatever.

If the image is stored in your macros it will bloat your macros so you may prefer to store it as a file and reference it from the action instead.

Also note that Mac App Store applications require authentication to change their icon and as such the action will not work for them unfortunately.

Requires Keyboard Maestro 9.2 and the Set File Icon action.

Fix App Icons.kmmacros (484 KB)

2 Likes

Apple in their infinite asininity and increasingly big-brotherish behavior...

<sigh>

-ccs

1 Like

Mini-truth has some questions for you sir

This is a HUGE time saver for me. When I first updated to Big Sur I didn't like that most apps had no been updated so I was making my own icons just for the apps in my dock. Than I stumbled across the site below which as about 4,000 plus Big Sur formatted icons. So I was going though and updating icons about once a week by hand to match, this is a huge timesaver for a cumbersome precess. Thank you!

3 Likes

Nice macro, thanks for sharing, didn't even realize there was an action for this. However, I can't seem to be able to set icons to Mac App Store apps, it throws an error. Probably because it requires authentication via Touch ID even when you change the icons normally, and I’m not sure if there's a way to work around this.

Yes, sadly it will not work with MAS apps as they are protected by the system. Apple do like their control - I mean, fancy being able to set a custom icon on an app you downloaded - clearly that is too much chaos and anarchy for Apple!

4 Likes

Logic Pro changed its project file icon at v10.7 to to one that's mostly white and therefore much harder to discern from audio file icons, which are also white.

Does anyone know of a way to change the default icon for files associated with an app, so that they all change system-wide? The file extension for Logic Pro projects is .logicx.