Snow Leopard is full of little surprises.
Last night, I posted an icon of Canada’s first ever mail stamp as a mail.app icon, and simply assumed that the tried and true way of changing it through the Inspectors still works. It doesn’t.
As Chocky helpfully points out in the comments (thanks!), the permissions of the core apps in Snow Leopard have been tightened so that you can’t by default copy and paste over the image of the icon in Apple Mail’s Inspector pane anymore.
However, all is not lost. I first tried brute force. I copied over the icon in Mail’s application package. That works fine, but is a little involved.
Fortunately, a few, simple additional steps can make the old method work again.
First, close Mail. Find Mail in the Applications folder, and press ⌘-I (Command + i) to bring up the Inspector pane.
Step One: Unlock it by clicking on the padlock in the bottom righthand corner of the pane. You will need to authenticate.
Step Two: Change the permissions listed for “everyone” from “Read only” “to Read & write”.
Step Three: Proceed as normal under the old method. Copy (⌘-C) the image of the icon that you want to use from the top lefthand corner of its Inspector, Select the Mail icon in its Inspector and paste (⌘-V) the new image over.
Step Four: Remember to change the permissions back to what they were.
All done! I’ve tried this three times now, and it’s worked every time. At the end of the process you have the new hand-crafted icon on Snow Leopard’s Mail:
If, on second thoughts, the new icon looks terrible, it’s easy to change it back again.
You actually do not need to change your permissions back. I chowned all the Apple-brand apps that Snow Leopard installed and haven’t had any trouble since.
Note that the first method – manually changing the icon in the application bundle – WILL break code signing in Snow Leopard. This means the app may have issues with both the Keychain and firewall. The other method works fine.
You can see some discussion on Code Signing here: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20090901205400914
Thank you for the How-To!
Could you post how we can revert to the original stamp ?
re: Adam,
you really really should change the permissions back.
permissions exist for a reason.
executable files (application) are set to readonly for security.
yes it’s unlikely that your mac will get a virus or get ‘hacked’ but if it does; open permissions (as you’ve set them) will mean the attacker doesn’t need any user/password to replace your Mail.app with another application of their choice and run it (for example; pretending to be mail.app and decrypting bits of your keychain to send back to it’s owner).
don’t mess with the permissions structure, it’s there for a reason.
Where can we get the cool snow leopard mail icon, i like it
And can someone tell these people who are packaging these icons as, .sit files, that Stuffit is as dead as my Apple IIe, stop doing it, please, just use .zip (built into OS X)
@macguitarman — I made it. Drop me an email and I’ll send you the file.
@Naner — all explained here:
http://www.hawkwings.net/2009/10/27/changing-back-snow-leopards-mail-icon/
Tim,
Thank you! I guess I missed that part in my excitement to change the icon.
I have done this but would like the icon in the Dock to be a little larger. How can I achieve that?
Hi
When I press ?-I to get the info pane – for the icon I want to use – there is no preview in the top left hand corner – just a blank/generic icns icon – has anybody got an idea why this is?
Thanks – Richard
Richard, sadly icns files contain an icon, but that is different than having the icon of the file set to that icon (if that makes sense).
Search for a free little program called icns2icon.app – which will put make the icns its own icon file and will then work as you expect.
@Steven — thanks for fielding that. Word for word, I would have said the same.
I think its worth it to link directly to http://osxiconeditor.phatcode.net/ which has so many useful icon utilities.
Many thanks – issue solved!
I am new to the “change your boring icons” scene and having a blast. I couldn’t, however, find that lovely snow leopard icon (a must have!) anywhere in your collection of 509 icons. Fortunately I just spotted macguitarman’s email requesting it. Tim, could you also send the file to me? I would love to have it gracing my desktop. Thanks in advance.
[...] about the guy from &seen making a new mail.app icon, and then Google for letting me search for the blog which eventually helped me take the &seen icon and set it up in Snow Leopard. Wait. [...]
Hello,
I’ve asked a long time ago if it would be possible to receive this great icon with the eagle as a psd, png, or something similar with transparent background.
Woul it be?
This should be it:
http://www.hawkwings.net/files/GrumpyBuzzard.zip