The new Cube Interface in Quicksilver is very nice, almost nice enough to tempt me away from the Bezel that I have used since I first stumbled across the app.

But the icons on each side of the interface are very small. I can only make out what they are by squinting.

So, emboldened by playing around with the look of Letterbox, I thought that I would see if you can make the icons bigger with Interface Builder. And you can.

Here’s a screenshot (poor quality, apologies) of the default layout and my tweaked one, which makes the central icon smaller and the ones on the side a little bigger:

It’s not hard to do. Interface Builder comes with the Mac OS X Developer Tools.

These tools are not installed by default, but you can find them on your installation discs, where they live in a folder called “Xcode Tools”. After installation you will find them in a folder called “Developer” in the root directory (this may not be the right word, but a hangover from pre-Mac days) of your harddrive.

Once they are installed, you can navigate to the Cube Interface.qsplugin file which is your ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Plugins folder.

Command-click (or right click) on the file and select “Show Package Contents”. Then navigate to the QSCubeInterface.nib file in Contents/Resources folder. You might want to back it up before you start playing with it, just in case.

Double click on the nib file to open it in Interface builder.

You will see the layout pictured here on the left. The squares are just like image place-holders or text boxes in any other app. You can resize them to your heart’s content.

Save and close Interface Builder and you are done. You might want to save a copy of your modified nib file somewhere else. I think Quicksilver’s update service will overwrite it when a new version of the plugin is installed.

No more squinting. Enjoy.