Add Folder Icons

Ordinary folders in the Mac OS X Finder are always displayed with the same boring old blue folder icon.

Sometimes you might want to liven this up. Perhaps you browse a music or photo collection through the Finder. Maybe you create artwork, or own a collection of home movie DVD files. Whatever things you have, one thing is for sure — the standard blue folder icon doesn't give you many clues about the folder's contents.

This is where Add Folder Icons comes in. It uses any pictures found inside a given folder to create a customised icon based on a configurable icon style. There is a set of built-in icon styles and you can create your own. In the example below, the first two rows of folders have a preset style applied and the bottom row has a customised style applied.

SlipCover integration

Now you can use SlipCover cases for icons as well as customising Add Folder Icon's own icon generation parameters. Many thanks to the SlipCover author for contributing the code to make this possible!

Further information

For more information, run the application and go to the “Add Folder Icons Help” entry of the “Help” menu. The full user guide is available there.

Technical footnote

It took a long time to finish this comparatively small application, but that's down to the big learning curve for the long list of Mac OS X technologies of which it takes advantage, including:

• Basics, like integration with system preferences, tabbed preferences panes, modal sheets and so-on; all aspects of general Mac OS X GUI development with XCode
• Extensive use of Cocoa bindings
• CoreData for icon style storage
• Full application localisation
• Multiple threads and worker tasks within modal run loops
• Inter-thread communication with NSConnection
• The application help mechanism and its specific implementation under Snow Leopard
• Extended use of blocks and concurrency in enumeration loops and the like, with Grand Central Dispatch continuing to underpin the command-line tool behind the scenes.