Self Service Aside - Creating Icons

I've seen a few posts on JAMFNation about creating icons for applications and thought I would make a quick post about it. Creating icons on a Mac is super duper easy. You'll have an advantage if you have the applications on your machine. If you don't, you can use the test machine that you use to build the software packages, as the best way to create Self Service icons is to use the icons of the application itself.

Workflow:
- Create software package in Composer on test machine, per usual.
- Before you uninstall the software or wipe the machine, do the following:

Go to the Applications folder on your machine and find your application that needs an icon for Self Service. Select it and Command-I/right-click and Get Info.

You'll get the above Info window. In that window, click on the icon in the top right corner, then click Command-C (copy).

Next, open Preview and click Command-N (New) to use the contents of the clipboard to make a new image file in Preview.

You'll get a new file with a bunch of layers. Because I like to be thorough, I click the first layer (layer 1) and copy it (Command-C). I then click Command-N (New) and create a new new file that is just a single icon image.

In your new new image (Untitled 2) change the size to 128x128 pixels, and the resolution to 72. We don't want this file to be any larger than necessary.

Save the file with an obvious name, and place it in a folder where you can back up and store custom icons. Make sure you do an Export so you can save it as a .png; by default, the icon file you used to create a new image is a pile of .tiff files, and that is not compatible with Self Service.