Icons on Melabit

macOS Tahoe: let's free the icons!

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 18:00:00 +0000

It is not just a matter of disk icons. As soon as I saw what Tahoe had done to the icons of many applications installed on my Mac, I decided I had to do something to restore the original look of the icons.

I tried several times, using Apple’s home‑automation tools, Automator and Shortcuts, but nothing worked and there was always some function missing. Or maybe I’m just not very good at using them.

Then I discovered fileicon, a library available on Homebrew that lets you programmatically modify file and folder icons. With that, the problem was practically solved.

– Source: Hennie Stander on Unsplash.

The squircle jail

With Tahoe Apple introduced a new icon format that now has to conform to the default shape of a squircle, a cross between a square and a circle (or a superellipse, for those who enjoy mathematics).

Apple redesigned its application icons to fit the new format and the aesthetic standards of Liquid Glass, although the final effect is often quite debatable. Even John Gruber doesn’t spare criticism of this aspect, going so far as to call the designer of the Automator icon a hack who never should have even gotten a job working at Apple (and how can one say he’s wrong?).

The problem, however, isn’t just that many Apple application icons lost meaning or are outright ugly, but also that many third‑party application icons don’t fit properly into the jail represented by the squircle.

It happens with all those applications that have beatifully-crafted icons, such as Audio Hijack, BBEdit, Alfred, Amphetamine, VLC, NValt, Gemini 2, HandBrake, Keyboard Maestro and so on.

These are all well-known applications built by medium-to-large teams. Yet overe these months they haven’t deemed it necessary (or useful) to adapt their gorgeous icons to the new standard imposed by Tahoe.

And imagine if the smaller developers, or those building cross‑platform applications where a unique, recognizable look is essential, have done it either.

What happens in those cases? Tahoe automatically shrinks the icons of these applications and encloses them within the squircle. Moreover, almost as if to remind developers to hurry up and comply with Cupertino’s dictates, it places these icons on a gray background which calling ugly would be an understatement.

In the first beta of Tahoe the final result was simply hawful, as you can see in the images from my first article on Tahoe. Moreover, this brutal treatment made some icons almost invisible (Tunnelblick, QGIS, OpenMV IDE, Thonny).

In the public version of Tahoe, released in September, and in the subsequent updates, Apple toned down some of the transparency excesses of Liquid Glass and also lightened the gray background of the icons that refused to fit within the squircle.

The final effect is undoubtedly better.¹ However, the gray‑bordered icons are still ugly and much smaller than they could (and should) be.

Can we do something to bring back the look they had before the Tahoe treatment?

Let’s Free the Icons

Obviously the answer is yes, otherwise I wouldn’t have written this post.

The manual method is described very well here and requires right‑clicking the application icon, selecting Get Info and replacing the icon thumbnail with the one that lives inside the application bundle itself.

To find it, right‑click the application icon again, choose Show Package Contents, click on the Contents folder, then on Resources and look for the file with the .icns extension (keeping in mind that some applications may contain more than one such file) and drag it onto the thumbnail in the Get Info window.

It sounds complicated but, with a bit of practice, it becomes fairly quick. This manual method works fine if you only have a few applications to fix. But if, as in my case, there are more than 20 applications, it quickly becomes tedious and error-prone. And, as if that weren’t enough, you’ll probably have to repeat the process every time the application is updated.

Better to let your Mac do everything automatically. And that’s where IconLib comes in.

IconLib

IconLib is a simple Bash script that automates the whole process, relying on the fileicon library to actually perform the icon modification. All you have to do is provide it with a file containing the list of applications to update – and sometimes the name of the .icns file too, because, darn it!, many developers use icon filenames that have nothing to do with the application name and often bundle multiple .icns files inside the application bundle – and it does the rest.

If you’re not happy with the result, you can run the script again with the -u switch (for undo), restoring the Tahoe icons.

You can also run IconLib on a list of applications, and then later edit the list to restore the icons for only the selected applications, leaving the others in their pre-Tahoe state.

All the details are in the README file of the GitHub repository and I won’t repeat them here. Instead I’ll just show how the icons look after fixing them with IconLib.

Even though the old icons don’t follow the stylistic dictates of the squircle, the richer, less constrained look and the absence of the gray background make me prefer them, at least until developers roll out new icons better suited for Tahoe.

Bare Bones Software just did it for BBEdit. The fact that such a major software house took so long indicates it’s no easy task, or that developers hoped (in vain) for months that Apple would backtrack. And if BBEdit took that long, it’s hard to imagine other cross‑platform or niche applications adapting quickly.

Conclusions

IconLib is not a must‑have program at all and it serves an admittedly narrow audience.

First of all, it is useful for people like me, who have many programs installed on their Macs, often produced by indie developers or by specialist teams that lack the time, desire, or expertise to deal with subtle graphics issues (think, for example, of Tunnelblick, for managing VPNs, Thonny, a must‑have for those who program microcontrollers in Python, or JASP, one of the best statistical programs for those who know little about statistics).

It also helps anyone who is dissatisfied with the jail that Tahoe enforces around the formerly magnificent icons of many applications.

Finally, it assists those who think Apple is overdoing this trend in macOS, which increasingly feels like an offshoot of iOS rather than a standalone system deserving its own life.

And lastly, it serves those who think Apple is going too far with this drift in macOS, which increasingly seems more like a by-product of iOS than an operating system worth its own independent existence.

While they were at it, couldn’t they have used a white background? ↩︎

macOS Tahoe: Developer Beta 3

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 06:00:00 +0000

A few days ago, right on schedule, Apple released to developers the third update of the macOS 26 Developer Beta, better known as Tahoe.

Once the update is complete, it doesn’t take long to realize that Apple is (slowly) modifying something in the Liquid Glass graphical interface of the latest version of its operating system.¹

Perhaps this is also to address the many criticisms it has received over the last month from big names like Riccardo Mori – whatever you think, his first article on MacOS Tahoe and Liquid Glass is a must-read (but his first and second follow-ups are also worth reading) – as well as from John Gruber, Craig Hockenberry, Francisco Tolmasky, Louie Mantia, Marco Arment and many others, as can be read in one of Michael Tsai’s masterful collections.² As well as, in my own humble and far less masterful writings (here and here).

It’s a beta

Let’s clear up a misunderstanding: constructively criticizing the beta version of an operating system, such as macOS, is a good and right thing to do.

When Apple releases a beta, they’re not doing us a favor by letting us preview an unreleased product. Rather, we’re doing Apple a favor by analyzing and dissecting their software in ways that might never have occurred to their official developers and testers.

To argue, as many do, that “you have to be patient, it’s just a beta” or that “betas always have bugs,” is utter nonsense, because it is precisely at this stage, when the product is tested in the field, that flaws emerge which official developers, accustomed to working on it every day for months, no longer notice.³

After all, if Apple has extended access to its Developer Betas to a much wider audience in recent years, it means that what is done in this phase is indeed useful to them!

The Wallpaper

The first thing you notice when you access your Mac after the update is the new default wallpaper, which now shows the rocky shore of Lake Tahoe, surrounded by a long chain of snow-capped mountains (in Nevada?).

I don’t particularly like these natural wallpapers; there are too many details that distract and prevent a clear view of what’s on the Desktop. However, compared to the anonymous wallpaper we had before (and which is still among the available wallpapers), this one is much better, so it’s all right. And the subtle ripple effect of the waves, which unfortunately isn’t visible in the screenshot, is truly delightful!

However, changing the active default wallpaper on the fly seems to hint some issues in the development direction of Tahoe/Liquid Glass, as will become even more apparent in the next section.

This, to be fair, is a change introduced in the previous beta, which I didn’t get a chance to write about here, yet. Apple has added an option to restore the menu bar background (System Settings > Menu Bar > Show menu bar background), just like in Sequoia and previous versions of macOS.

In my opinion, this is an excellent decision because, after using macOS Tahoe for a few weeks, I realized that having a transparent menu bar available is useless. For at least two reasons.

The first is that with a transparent bar, menu items and icons tend to blend into the background image, becoming much less legible. This effect is particularly severe when the wallpaper is full of details and gradients, as in the example below.

The difference in clarity when the menu bar has a background is evident.

The second reason is that, even if the menu bar is transparent, it cannot (rightly) be occupied by application windows, so you don’t gain useful space for applications.

What is the real purpose of a transparent menu bar if it is less legible and doesn’t provide more useful space for applications? It is just to achieve a (questionable) more homogeneous visual effect without any functional advantage?

Most people use their computers to work. They don’t spend all day admiring the desktop. Why should they struggle to read the menu items or the battery level, the Wi-Fi strength, and all the other icons that are there for a specific purpose, just because some dime-a-dozen designer decided that the menu bar should blend in with the desktop?

It is striking, though, that after no less than two Developer Beta releases, this setting has still not been translated into Italian and, I imagine, other languages. It is a small detail, but that gives the impression of a half-baked, thrown-together thing, something that the team working on this part of Tahoe is still not quite clear on.

This reinforces doubts about how Tahoe’s development is progressing, as expressed very well by Craig Grannelli.

[this change] also makes me question Apple�s confidence in its design work. When Apple starts hedging its bets, it signals that it knows something is wrong, but lacks the conviction to course-correct. Or perhaps such settings are a means to temporarily shut people up, while default choices reveal the true intent and direction of travel.

System Settings

In my first article on Tahoe, I reported that the new Appearance item in System Settings behaved strangely: setting the Auto mode in the section related to Dark, Clear, and Tinted icon (and widget) styles apparently had no effect.

In the article, I supposed that this mode would allow the operating system to automatically adapt the display details of the chosen icon and widget style to the active Light or Dark mode. However, I also noted that the implementation seemed rather confusing.

Actually, it wasn’t a poorly implemented feature; it was a true bug, as reported in the Release Notes for this beta.

Finder
Resolved Issues

Fixed: Finder does not display Dark Mode app icons or tinted folder colors when the Folder Color setting in System Settings > Appearance is set to Automatic. (152193702)

Unfortunately, even though Apple claims to have fixed the problem, I don’t see any improvement. However, I clearly see that certain combinations of settings still result in such low icon contrast that it becomes difficult to tell them apart.

The Finder

As soon as I opened the Finder, I had the impression that Apple had reduced the shadow intensity of the separate groups of icons that now make up the Toolbar.

Unfortunately, this is not the case; the shadow intensity, as well as the icon transparency, is identical to before, producing the same color mess described in the previous article whenever the more colorful icons in the main Finder window end up beneath those in the Toolbar.

To avoid this, it would be enough for the Finder’s Toolbar to retain the white background present since Big Sur (that replaced the previous metallic one). This way, the icons shown in the main Finder window would be visible only in that window, without spilling over into the area reserved for the Toolbar.⁴

The more I use Tahoe’s new-Finder, the more I wonder what’s the point of this confusion, where the Toolbar – which isn’t there for beauty but to manage files and navigate the file system – has to blend and overlap with the files themselves, in an indistinct mix that isn’t even aesthetically pleasing?

Even Apple’s developers seem to have doubts about their choices, as switching from Icon to List view shows the usual clear separation between the main window and the Toolbar (apart from the three-dimensional effect added to the latter by Liquid Glass).

If we switch to Column view, we find a third, intermediate mode between the previous two. In this mode, the Toolbar has a white background, but where the icons of applications and files are blurred well before they reach the Toolbar, as happens in the normal Icon view.

This confusion in the display mode of the Toolbar is not only present in the Finder but also in applications like Notes where, depending on the chosen display mode, you can find yourself with a transparent Toolbar that blurs everything that ends up underneath it,

or with a normal Toolbar with a white background, as we are used to seeing since Big Sur.

Something similar also happens with Font Book, albeit with slightly different modes, while it doesn’t happen with Freeform or Preview, which always have a transparent Toolbar. Reminders is another special case, but I’ll leave you the pleasure to figure out why.

In short, there seems to be a great deal of confusion in Cupertino, and even the developers cannot decide what to do with the new Liquid Glass-style Toolbar.

Application Icons

I want to give the new application icons in the Finder their own section because, in this case, it’s no longer a simple matter of taste, but of the relationship between Apple and developers. After all, developers are fundamental to the success of a platform.

But first, let’s briefly recap the issue.

In macOS Tahoe, Apple has introduced a new icon format for applications, borrowed from iOS. The new icons have the shape of a squircle, a geometric shape intermediate between a circle and a square, and can be created with the new Icon Composer. This new format allows, among other things, to dynamically adapt the icons to the chosen style, or rather Appearance (see the System Settings section).

So far, so good.

The problem arises from the fact that there is no choice: the icons of all applications installed on the Mac can no longer have a customized shape, such as that of BBEdit which I am using to write this post, but must obligatorily adopt the squircle shape.

All application icons that have not yet adapted to the new style imposed by Liquid Glass are automatically enclosed in a squircle with an horrible dark gray background behind them, which seems to be placed there specifically to flag those bad products that have not yet conformed to Apple’s new guidelines.⁵

But redesigning icons is no piece of cake. For example, Bare Bones Software, which is certainly not an indie software house, has not complied yet. Its flagship product, BBEdit, was given a major update just a few days ago, but retained its traditional icon.

Independent developers are even less enthusiastic about having to redo all their application icons following the new format imposed by Apple.

One of them is Howard Oakley, who ironically calls macOS Tahoe the iconoclast, and equates the squircle with the gray background to a sin bin, as the area of the field where a player who has committed a foul is temporarily confined.⁶ Someone else goes even harder and calls the squircle a true prison.

Even those who decide to comply have problems because, as Howard Oakley tells us, updated icons for Tahoe may not work correctly in previous versions of macOS.

Half of the applications installed on the Mac that I updated to macOS Tahoe have grey icons. In the month and a half between the release of the first Developer Beta and today, I believe none of them have adopted the new icon format. This includes Google Chrome, which certainly has the resources to adapt quickly. Some Apple applications, such as GarageBand and Xcode, don’t even follow their own guidelines. The latter is particularly significant given that Xcode is the main tool for developing Mac applications.

My impression is that Tahoe’s graphical interface is not carved in stone -� oops, in glass – and that developers prefer to wait for the final version before conforming to Apple’s dictates.

After all, between Developer Beta 1 and Beta 2, Apple has already changed the Finder icon due to popular outcry, and has added the option to restore the menu bar background. So it’s clear that Apple is not insensitive to the criticisms expressed by those who are previewing Tahoe.⁷

I almost forgot: you can even restore the usual oddly-shaped icons in Tahoe. However, it’s a manual and rather tedious process, that must be repeated for each affected application and for each Mac. I’ll pass.

Performance

The third Developer Beta of macOS Tahoe seems much slower than the two previous versions. For example, Firefox takes forever to launch and restore previous tabs, but almost all applications seem more sluggish, especially at startup, than is reasonable to expect on Apple Silicon. Some ‘System Settings’ panels appear completely empty at first and take several seconds to display the available options.

As annoying as it is, this is normal behavior in a beta, which by its nature is filled with debug code and immature or poorly tested functions that may generate memory leaks, erroneous cache usage, and the like. I only mention it here because the first two Developer Betas appeared much more responsive than this one.

In any case, restarting the system solves the problem, at least temporarily, while we await the release of the final version.

Conclusions

In a few days, perhaps even tomorrow, Apple will make the Tahoe beta available to everyone, so that it can be tested by a much wider and more diverse audience.

As I said earlier, the fact that the Finder icon was changed mid-development demonstrates that Apple is listening to criticism about the new macOS interface. So there is hope that other issues will be resolved in the two months remaining until the official release of the new macOS version.

If someone thinks that critical posts like those cited above, and maybe even the little notes you’ve just read, are written solely for the purpose of getting easy clicks… well, never mind, the authors will come to terms with it.

If someone thinks that critical posts like the ones mentioned above, or maybe even the humble piece you’ve just read, are written purely to get easy clicks, well, never mind… the authors will come to terms with it.

Apple is doing the same with the corresponding version of iPadOS (which I’m testing on my iPad Pro) and iOS (which I’m leaving alone for now). ↩︎
Riccardo Mori describes himself as a translator and writer, but in reality he also has extensive expertise in the field of design and typography. John Gruber has been writing one of the most important blogs dedicated to the Apple universe for more years than I can remember and is the inventor of Markdown. Craig Hockenberry is a developer who has produced, among other things, Tot, which I adore, and is one of the souls of Iconfactory. Francisco Tolmasky was a member of the original iPhone team, where he helped develop Safari for iOS, and is the creator of Objective-J, a superset of JavaScript, and Cappuccino, an “open source framework that simplifies the creation of desktop-class applications running in a web browser”. Louie Mantia is an artist and graphic designer specializing in icon design. Marco Arment is an iOS and web application developer, as well as a “writer, podcast producer, geek, and coffee lover.” ↩︎
More or less the same thing happens when writing: if you have a text read by a third person, they will much more easily notice errors that the author, who now knows the text by heart, no longer pays attention to. ↩︎
As has always been the case, not just in macOS (or Mac OS X, or whatever you prefer to call it), from Sequoia all the way back to Cheetah, but also in the versions of Mac OS released throughout the ’80s and ’90s. ↩︎
To make a sporting comparison, Apple seems more or less like that soccer referee who pulls out a yellow card while warning the striker that “one more silly mistake and I’ll send you off.” ↩︎
I swear that when I wrote the soccer comparison in the previous note, I had not yet read this comment by Howard Oakley. ↩︎
I can’t help but think that if Steve Jobs had seen what some of his Finder icons have become, he would have kicked those responsible right out the window. ↩︎

Icons on Melabit

macOS Tahoe: let's free the icons!

The squircle jail

Let’s Free the Icons

IconLib

Conclusions

macOS Tahoe: Developer Beta 3

It’s a beta

The Wallpaper

The Menu Bar

System Settings

The Finder

Application Icons

Performance

Conclusions