Tutorial: how to convert Mac Icon sets to Windows

As you might know, we at Iconshock post one handpicked icon set from around the world DAILY. Yes, you read it well, we do it at a daily basis, because we want to turn the blog into a comprehensive catalogue of the best icon work from top artists around the net.

But early on in our quest, a problem arose; every time I posted a Mac icon, the complains just poured and almost everybody was disappointed. Everyone but Mac users of course. I know that Mac fans are less than Pc users… But that doesn’t mean that PC users can’t own the wonderful artistry of Mac icons. A very kind blog reader called “Southerner” left a comment some time ago with useful step by step info that I wanted to show here and turn into this tutorial, so you guys can enjoy the icons we post, regardless of their format. So…here we go!

Step 1. – Download & Extract

Mac icons generally come in the ICNS format. When dealing with Mac files, these are either compressed in zip (in such case there shouldn’t be any problem for Windows users) in sit, sitx or dmg.

IN CASE THEY ARE SIT – SITX :

These are the most popular file compression formats available for Apple computers since the late 80’s. They were developed by Raymond Lau.

The Quick & Dirty way to decompress them:

A. Download Stuffit Expander. (its free)

B. Open the program and choose your sit, sitx file.

STUFFIT EXPANDER>FILE>OPEN

C. Click on the “expand all” button and choose your destination folder.

STUFFIT EXPANDER>ARCHIVE>EXPAND ALL

And you’re done. Now, the long way to extract them: A. Download and install the excellent “ExtractNow” software made by Nathan Moinvaziri.

“Extractnow” weighs only 1MB.

B. Download the “SIT” library so the program can understand and extract SIT files. stuffit5.engine-5.1.dll

Download may not work on all browsers, so you may have to click on the rescue link on the bottom of the page.

C. Copy stuffit5.engine-5.1.dll to c:\program files\extractnow D. Run “Extractnow” and drag the SIT file into the window.

You can also open the files by right clicking>Add Archives

E. Click on the “extract” button and the program will extract the files on the same location as the compressed source. IN CASE THE FILES ARE DMG .Dmg is a disk image format created for Mac OSX. Although you can extract or “mount” these files on a Windows machine, if the files inside the disk image are Mac OSX exclusive, there is no way in this life you can run them or open them in any way. Icons always come in .ICNS or .PNG files, both file types completely compatible between platforms. A. Download and install the powerful open source app “7-Zip”

Z-zip is an open source project by Igor Pavlov.

B. Right click over the DMG file and choose from the menu  Z-Zip>extract files…

Z-Zip in action

C. Z-zip will always extract a .hfs file. This format is from Apple’s file system. Go ahead and right click over the .hfs and extract it again with Z-Zip. It will open all the original files and folders. D. Browse the new files. You will see many files that are 0k or 1k in size; these obviously are useless. You have to browse for the files you are interested in. Search them by their name and check out that they do have some weight. Sometimes files can be named without any extension to identify them, so the files size is your most important reference to find what you want.

The files at the left are useless.

E. Copy those files to a new folder outside the extracted tree. I don’t know why, but sometimes they can’t be converted if you leave them where they are. Step 2. - Convert them! A. Download and install IcoFX, the marvelous software by Attila Kovrig. This is a powerful icon editing application that will let you convert the Mac ICNS Icon format to Windows ICO, or to individual images such as PNG and Jpeg. B. Open your file with IcoFX and save it as ICO.

With ICOFX you can also edit your icons, and export them as individual images.

Wrap up! Long story wasn’t it? Looks longer than it really is. Trust me. These are simple steps for any Pc user to get the most out of the icon world. Now nothing can stop you icon junkies! Go and conquer the icon world!