Description: I started the massive undertaking of doing a proper porting of the Mac icon theme to Linux. I was pretty disappointed at the poorly cobbled together mashup of icons being passed of as an OSX icon theme (mac4lin,). The so-called "Mac icon theme" is a complete mess; a hodgpodge of Oxygen, Nuovext, Windows and OSX icons that look shiny, but you can hardly call it a cohesive theme. It looks like a mess of icons randomly pulled off of google image search and sloppily thrown together by a 12 year old on ritalin. An absolute disgrace to anyone who has ever even seen a Mac before. One of the things that makes OSX so great is the attention to detail. Taking design elements from four or five different sources and packaging them together does not make a complete set.
In order to ensure that what I ended up with turned out to be as realistic as possible, I started with the Elementary icon theme which is the most complete and well thought out icon theme available for Linux -- period. I started by using imagemagick to mogrify all the svg files into pngs which I went through and replaced one by one.
The real trick though was getting the actual OSX icons out of OSX and onto linux. I simply ran a recursive search on my entire OSX hard drive looking for .icns files and copyign them one by one to a folder. Then I used icns2png to batch convert every single one to it's various sizes, and then I sorted them all by size into corresponding folders.
The hardest part to port was by far the menu extras (app indicators as they're called on Ubuntu). On Snow Leopard and later, they are no longer .tiff files, instead they're some goofy form of PDF which doesn't play very well with anything (not even Adobe). However, they are essentially just vector drawings. After using several tools (most of which cryptic command line stuff), I was finally able to extract some usable svgs from them.
As of right now the theme is maybe halfway done. Places, Apps and Devices are all complete, only needing fine tuning. The bulk of the App Indicators are done, ie; Network Manager, Volume Control and Battery, plus a few others. Categories, Actions, Mimetypes and pretty much everything else unless otherwise noted have not been touched.
In case you're wondering what icons were chosen for I tried to pick the most logical analog for each app from OSX to Ubuntu.
Text Edit - Gedit Quicksilver - Gnome Do Finder - Nautilus App Store - Ubuntu Software Center Epiphany - Safari Apple Mail - Evolution iChat - Empathy Adium - Pidgin (Yes I know there is a port of Pidgin for OSX) iTunes - Banshee Garage Band - Jokosher Front Row - Moovida (I would have preferred Elisa, but it's no longer in the repos. I liked Elisa's interface better than Moovida's) Roxio - Nero Linux Photo Booth - Cheese iPhoto - Shotwell/F-spot OpenShot - iMovie HD iDVD - DeVeDe Preference Panel - Gnome Control Center
I used Adobe CS5 style icons for Gimp and Inkscape, but I'm planning on including a script to switch them to their normal icons if you so choose.
Credit where credit is due, as I mentioned I started out with Elementary icons as a base so thanks goes out to Dan Rabbit and the Elementary team, and then started switching the icons out with icons directly from OSX, so of course the Apple graphic designers as well. CS5 Gimp and Inkscape icons were created by user ~coreper here on DA.
I'll be posting updates as this theme becomes more complete. In case anyone is wondering, I'm running Ubuntu 11.04 with Gnome2 in the screenshot.
If you have any recommendations, found any errors or have any suggestions or request, please feel free to ask me.Last changelog:
UPDATE: 01-27-12 Nothing major, just a bug fix release. Fixed some scaling issues with some of the monochromatic indicators and a few missing applications. The Docky theme is actually a custom build of Docky (note the indicators) from launchpad based on the Docky 2.2.0 which I modded and have available for download as .deb for both 32 bit and 64 bit.
>The so-called \"Mac icon theme\" is a complete mess; a hodgpodge of Oxygen, Nuovext, Windows and OSX icons that look shiny, but you can hardly call it a cohesive theme. It looks like a mess of icons randomly pulled off of google image search and sloppily thrown together by a 12 year old on ritalin.
Haha man, I trooly understand you and support this words. I'm making my theme and (soon, I believe) upload new icons pack here (old - https://www.opendesktop.org/p/1011981/) just because of this big problem. It's going to be fully vector pixel-perfect recreation of Mavericks icons, so if you read this and interested go to my page and check, maybe it's uploaded already :)
I like the menu bar, what one are you using? The one I have doesn't list the current application title and I'd really like it to
I'm using the icon set by the way, I LOVE it!
I like this theme very much, but after applying it into Ubuntu 12.04 (alpha 2), it's still not enough icons to fit. Wish the author continue developing it for ubuntu 12.04. Thx in advance.
We already have one great Mac icon theme, called "Macbuntu", which seems to be of a very good quality and not just a mixture of other themes (I'm not 100% sure, since I'm yet to buy a Mac): http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Macbuntu?content=129021 Have you chcecked it out?
That theme in particular is what prompted me to create a proper portage of the OSX icon set. It is NOT complete, nor is it proper. It contains a dozens icons from Vista/Windows 7, Nuovext, Oxygen and a few others. Where the creators of Macbuntu applied artistic license to fill in the gaps on their icon set (eg; the Firefox icon), I have stuck with strict adherence to the Apple interface.
The one and only notable place that I deviated from the icons from OSX are Inkscape and Gimp which as noted in the readme I will later include a script to switch between the stock icons and the Adobe CS5 styled ones I added.
Also, the monochromatic indicators are incorrect. Macbuntu uses the mono icons from Faenza. Mine are literally pixel perfect copies imported to vector (svg).
The Macbuntu theme is what I would call "Mac Like" whereas mine aims to be a true one-for-one port of the OSX icon theme to Linux. My icon set is far from complete at the moment.
I'm not making money off of selling their icons, and Linux is not now nor will it ever be a direct replacement for OSX. I fail to see what relevance trademark has to do with it since I'm not using it in any commercial or industrial capacity. If anything, it's free advertising and product placement for Apple. So until the lawyers from Cupertino, CA come beating down my door with a cease and desist order I'm not going change anything. I converted the icons from my Mac to something usable in the Linux partition on the same computer. Even if I get told to remove my icon set from here, it's available other places on the web as well and I'm going to continue to use this icon set until I get bored of it anyway.
If you really have an issue with my icon set why don't you go complain to all the people who ported the Windows Icon themes, or the other creators of Mac icon themes?
I think that Linux IS and should be a FREE and THE MOST FLEXIBLE Operation System, compared to the rest, including MacOS and Microsoft, rather than coping the whole system from them.
Thus, this author is FREE to customise his system the way he likes best !? I mix the best icons, that can find in the web, and create awesome mixtures of 'Apple' start-button with win-icons and self-made ones : the result is everybody whom I make a Linux installation is happy :)
There are a lot of great pictures in this world, and Linux is the right way to used them like icons for free ...
That's why we all LOVE LINUX :)
I am not saying that Linux should not be free, I am saying that distributing the icons like this violates Apple's trademark. It makes no difference if people like the icons. You can go read Apple's trademark policy. And, for your information, there are times when I want to use some of Apple's icons, but I can't. And that stinks, but it is the way things are.
While a commercial use of any kind is quite obvious, Apple's guidelines are very vague on the subject of purely personal use.
Since nobody chooses an OS, or a whole hardware/software platform, based solely/mainly on the look and feel (it's not that important, since you must just get used to it), all the look-alike themes doesn't cause any real losses to the manufacturer, unless used commercially. For this reason I'm pretty sure Apple or Microsoft doesn't care, especially since there's a real problem, called "software piracy" ("Hackintosh" in Apple's case). No matter how hard you try mimicking - which has very obvious, natural limits - if you want Windows or OSX, you must simply buy it, because Linux is definitely NOT a free version of other system (treating it this, and not as something completely different, you will likely make you come to disliking it).
just a note:
In Europe Hackintosh is perfectly legal!
Hackintosh = Any PC with an OS X license BOUGHT AND PAID
There is a final judgment about it
I have a perfectly legal hackintosh, OS X cost me 25 eur, but I work most of the time with opensuse ;)
Where exactly?
Apple's license doesn't allow installing Mac OS on the non-Apple machines, so it's definitely not legal. You might be just lucky no one has noticed, especially if it is a business machine, but it's no different from any other license violation.
Negative ghost rider... There is nothing illegal about installing OSX and other Apple software regardless of how much Apple would like you to think so. It is only a violation on Apple's End User License Agreement (EULA). Installing Apple software on non Apple hardware is a violation of license terms, but doing so carries absoluetly no legal implications nor will it result in any punitive measures.
That being said, >>SELLING<< a non Apple branded computer with OSX on it is in fact illegal. well... once again, it's technically not "illegal" but it is a violation of Apple's EULA whereby one incurs a capital gain that represents a loss to Apple Inc. Case in point, Psystar Computers. Psystar's claim is that they have not broken any laws (which they technically haven't) and merely bypassed the software limitations of OSX by emulating EFI on non EFI based systems. And of course Apple's lawyers have buried them in an onslaught of lawsuits, but there is still not a clear definition as to whether a hackintosh is truly illegal. And until a case goes to the supreme court such a determination will not be made. And Apple only wishes they were that important.
here www.pearc.es,
if I remember correctly, is a spanish branch of a german store
It takes 3 years open selling and no legal problems,
I do not know how it will be tomorrow, but today it is legal for 3 years :)
Sometimes people confuse the terms of license with the drafting of a law.
The license terms may also be illegal, not just users, and in some European courts considered that some clauses are unfair, and therefore not required comply
speak in these terms in english I find it hard, sorry
Ratings & Comments
19 Comments
I'm getting an error 404 on the download link, has your deviantArt account been closed or something?
>The so-called \"Mac icon theme\" is a complete mess; a hodgpodge of Oxygen, Nuovext, Windows and OSX icons that look shiny, but you can hardly call it a cohesive theme. It looks like a mess of icons randomly pulled off of google image search and sloppily thrown together by a 12 year old on ritalin. Haha man, I trooly understand you and support this words. I'm making my theme and (soon, I believe) upload new icons pack here (old - https://www.opendesktop.org/p/1011981/) just because of this big problem. It's going to be fully vector pixel-perfect recreation of Mavericks icons, so if you read this and interested go to my page and check, maybe it's uploaded already :)
I like the menu bar, what one are you using? The one I have doesn't list the current application title and I'd really like it to I'm using the icon set by the way, I LOVE it!
Gnome 2 Global Menu applet. http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/
I like this theme very much, but after applying it into Ubuntu 12.04 (alpha 2), it's still not enough icons to fit. Wish the author continue developing it for ubuntu 12.04. Thx in advance.
Good icon theme, I have really enjoyed. thank you very much P.S. Apologies for my previous off-topic.
We already have one great Mac icon theme, called "Macbuntu", which seems to be of a very good quality and not just a mixture of other themes (I'm not 100% sure, since I'm yet to buy a Mac): http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Macbuntu?content=129021 Have you chcecked it out?
That theme in particular is what prompted me to create a proper portage of the OSX icon set. It is NOT complete, nor is it proper. It contains a dozens icons from Vista/Windows 7, Nuovext, Oxygen and a few others. Where the creators of Macbuntu applied artistic license to fill in the gaps on their icon set (eg; the Firefox icon), I have stuck with strict adherence to the Apple interface. The one and only notable place that I deviated from the icons from OSX are Inkscape and Gimp which as noted in the readme I will later include a script to switch between the stock icons and the Adobe CS5 styled ones I added. Also, the monochromatic indicators are incorrect. Macbuntu uses the mono icons from Faenza. Mine are literally pixel perfect copies imported to vector (svg). The Macbuntu theme is what I would call "Mac Like" whereas mine aims to be a true one-for-one port of the OSX icon theme to Linux. My icon set is far from complete at the moment.
In this case I'm looking forward to the final result of your work, which might ultimately replace Macbuntu on my Mac-like desktop.:)
I'm not making money off of selling their icons, and Linux is not now nor will it ever be a direct replacement for OSX. I fail to see what relevance trademark has to do with it since I'm not using it in any commercial or industrial capacity. If anything, it's free advertising and product placement for Apple. So until the lawyers from Cupertino, CA come beating down my door with a cease and desist order I'm not going change anything. I converted the icons from my Mac to something usable in the Linux partition on the same computer. Even if I get told to remove my icon set from here, it's available other places on the web as well and I'm going to continue to use this icon set until I get bored of it anyway. If you really have an issue with my icon set why don't you go complain to all the people who ported the Windows Icon themes, or the other creators of Mac icon themes?
I know from recent research on Apple and Microsoft logo trademarks, that this theme goes against their trademark policy
I think that Linux IS and should be a FREE and THE MOST FLEXIBLE Operation System, compared to the rest, including MacOS and Microsoft, rather than coping the whole system from them. Thus, this author is FREE to customise his system the way he likes best !? I mix the best icons, that can find in the web, and create awesome mixtures of 'Apple' start-button with win-icons and self-made ones : the result is everybody whom I make a Linux installation is happy :) There are a lot of great pictures in this world, and Linux is the right way to used them like icons for free ... That's why we all LOVE LINUX :)
I am not saying that Linux should not be free, I am saying that distributing the icons like this violates Apple's trademark. It makes no difference if people like the icons. You can go read Apple's trademark policy. And, for your information, there are times when I want to use some of Apple's icons, but I can't. And that stinks, but it is the way things are.
While a commercial use of any kind is quite obvious, Apple's guidelines are very vague on the subject of purely personal use. Since nobody chooses an OS, or a whole hardware/software platform, based solely/mainly on the look and feel (it's not that important, since you must just get used to it), all the look-alike themes doesn't cause any real losses to the manufacturer, unless used commercially. For this reason I'm pretty sure Apple or Microsoft doesn't care, especially since there's a real problem, called "software piracy" ("Hackintosh" in Apple's case). No matter how hard you try mimicking - which has very obvious, natural limits - if you want Windows or OSX, you must simply buy it, because Linux is definitely NOT a free version of other system (treating it this, and not as something completely different, you will likely make you come to disliking it).
just a note: In Europe Hackintosh is perfectly legal! Hackintosh = Any PC with an OS X license BOUGHT AND PAID There is a final judgment about it I have a perfectly legal hackintosh, OS X cost me 25 eur, but I work most of the time with opensuse ;)
Where exactly? Apple's license doesn't allow installing Mac OS on the non-Apple machines, so it's definitely not legal. You might be just lucky no one has noticed, especially if it is a business machine, but it's no different from any other license violation.
Negative ghost rider... There is nothing illegal about installing OSX and other Apple software regardless of how much Apple would like you to think so. It is only a violation on Apple's End User License Agreement (EULA). Installing Apple software on non Apple hardware is a violation of license terms, but doing so carries absoluetly no legal implications nor will it result in any punitive measures. That being said, >>SELLING<< a non Apple branded computer with OSX on it is in fact illegal. well... once again, it's technically not "illegal" but it is a violation of Apple's EULA whereby one incurs a capital gain that represents a loss to Apple Inc. Case in point, Psystar Computers. Psystar's claim is that they have not broken any laws (which they technically haven't) and merely bypassed the software limitations of OSX by emulating EFI on non EFI based systems. And of course Apple's lawyers have buried them in an onslaught of lawsuits, but there is still not a clear definition as to whether a hackintosh is truly illegal. And until a case goes to the supreme court such a determination will not be made. And Apple only wishes they were that important.
here www.pearc.es, if I remember correctly, is a spanish branch of a german store It takes 3 years open selling and no legal problems, I do not know how it will be tomorrow, but today it is legal for 3 years :)
Sometimes people confuse the terms of license with the drafting of a law. The license terms may also be illegal, not just users, and in some European courts considered that some clauses are unfair, and therefore not required comply speak in these terms in english I find it hard, sorry