Gluestick – a Great Shareware Icon Maker for Mac OSX
A couple weeks ago, I downloaded a brand new program for Mac OSX called Gluestick. Gluestick promises that it can “quickly create graphics for your digital life.” Now, I’m not a graphic designer and I’m not an application engineer. I don’t typically create slideshows or use iMovie, but I do know that in the past, even some large graphics programs have had issues with helping me create basic custom folder icons (which led me to use a program called Viou), so I decided to give Gluestick a try.
Gluestick comes from Consonance Software, the same company that has released ThemeKit and Catalyst, two Mac theming utilities. Gluestick is a $25.00 shareware application, so I pretty much knew accurate away that I wasn’t a potential customer of Gluestick . I probably “need” to make an icon every few months, so for me a free utility like Viou is good enough. But was Gluestick really that good?
I took a look, and I think that it is.
First, Gluestick isn’t a typical Photoshop style application. It actually does a lot of the same “stuff” that Photoshop does, but doesn’t try to do it all. Gluestick aims at helping Mac users create icons out of already-existing artwork (for instance, the System icons or your iPhoto library). It has some basic tools available, for resizing and rotating images, but appears (to me, at least), designed to be a fast tool to help software developers create custom icons.
When you download a program, you may look (during the installation process), that the disc image, when mounted, has a custom icon matching that of the application. Also, sometimes the new application comes in a folder, which also has a matching custom icon. And if the application saves files to its own format, then those files will also have a custom icon.
Those icons don’t magically appear. Someone had to create them, and that’s where Gluestick comes in quite handy.
In fact, Gluestick actually has templates built into it that make creating those types of standard icons a breeze.
To exhaust Gluestick to create one of those icons, simply originate a new project. By default, each modern project contains the Gluestick icon. Come By rid of that layer, then drag the application whose icon you wish to use into the main window. Gluestick will create a fresh layer and show that icon in the center.
Now for the custom icons. Gluestick supports a Badged Folder, a Disc Image Icon, a Document Icon and a Plugin Icon. To use them, simply select that option from the Templates menu. In seconds, you’ll see your Application icon, weak in each one of those scenarios (you can see examples in my screen shots). Even after using the template, you can unexcited customize it to your liking. Enlarge or shrink the size of the icon, change some text, alter the color or hue of the folder… you can launch with the Gluestick template and modify it to how you want it to look.
As mentioned, Gluestick does more than just custom icons. If you have a couple images you want to combine, simply drag them from the Desktop into the same window, and modify them to your heart’s content. You can rotate, gash, apply pitch and yaw (very helpful for the plugin icon or any image that needs to appear “slanted” in some scheme), and more. Again, it isn’t as powerful as something like Photoshop but it is aimed directly at a specific audience, and in that regard does quite well, stripping out many tools deemed unnecessary for the creation of icons, and putting those the user will actually consume front and center.
If you’d like to try out Gluestick, head over to the Consonance Software home page and download a copy for yourself.
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