Appletell

Leopard’s been out for a while now and if you updated when it came out, you’re probably at a stage where you are a little sick of the system’s icons. Here are some free sets of icons that are fresh and can easily spice up your desktop. I come across a lot of icons, as I not only write for Appletell, but manage MacintoshGUI. We feature a design related goodie everyday, and here are some of the favorites for the past 30 days.

I find that Coda is one of the best tools for web development on the Mac, and the green leaf icon looks really good. After a while, as most things do, it gets a little old, and this set of Coda leaves will hopefully spice up your dock. These are made by Louie Mantia (pictured above), who has some CandyBar replacement icons, so check them out too. (CandyBar is an application that lets you change your system’s icons, dock, and mange a collection of icons.)

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Product: CandyBar
Price: $29
Rating: 9/10.0 (Excellent)
Pros: Very easy to use, Pixadex built in, 512x512 icons and docks, new interface.
Cons: Somewhat cluttered interface.
Overall: CandyBar 3 combines Pixadex to store and apply your icons and docks.

Candybar 3 is Panic’s latest release of their icon applying application, new in version 3 is a New Interface, Quick Look, Support for Docks, Smart Collections and much more. They have also built Pixadex, an application for storing icons right into CandyBar, this allows you to store 512x512 pixel high resolution icons and apply them with in the application.  Using CandyBar 3 it is easy to orgainize and change your icons, even those in the hard to find areas such as hard drives, application icons and even badges.

Interface - 10/10 - The interface is a steady upgrade over version 2, it makes use of many of Leopard’s new features, and even has a lookalike Quick Look. All the parts of the main window are very smooth when opening and closing, and allow you to browse a large collection very quickly, easily and fluidly, with short load times.

Features - 8/10 - The feature set in this new release is very good. Now that you can store, organize, change and view all of your icons and docks easily, it makes an icon collectors job very easy.

From the CandyBar Website;

New Features

Brand New Interface
Store and browse icons (and iContainers) with ease

Quick Look
Totally integrated: view iContainers in the Finder itself

512×512 Icons
Mega sized, hyper detailed, good to go

Better iContainers
Save and load icons, and docks, all bundled up

Super Speed
Load and browse icons in a flash, thanks to Leopard

Quick Drop
Easily apply icons to individual folders

Organize Docks, Too
Got an iContainer with a Dock? We’ll hold onto it

Smart Collections
Search and build dynamic icon collections