[devlog] I made an app to restore oddly shaped icon on macOS 26
TL;DR: It’s all on GitHub
The Problem
Apple decided that every app icon should be wrapped in a rectangle “for consistency.”
The result? Icons that don’t follow Apple’s standards now appear inside a dull gray box.
Not only does this look ugly, but it also makes them harder to recognize.
Personally, I’ve always loved the old oddly shaped icons.
They’re lively, and often beautifully detailed. To make matters worse, some old apps will never receive updates that fix their icons.
So when I stumbled across Simon’s post, I was thrilled and decided to build an app that makes restoring these legacy icons easier.
Making It Work
At first, I had no idea how to make a macOS app.
I tried using Python with a TUI (Terminal User Interface), but I quickly gave up—the textual DataTable component was a mess for me.
Eventually, I turned to Claude.
I described my idea, and it instantly generated code.
The UI it produced was surprisingly elegant and visually pleasing:
…but the backend was completely unusable.
Still, it was a solid start.
After some searching, I came across this Stack Overflow post explaining how to set icons via the CLI, and I adapted the approach for my app.
It took me hours tweaking—partly because I had no idea I needed to disable sandboxing to run shell scripts in a mac app.
But after plenty of trial and error, I finally got it working.
AI helped me a lot throughout this process, but still not reliable enough replacing an experienced human engineer (at least on the free tier :D).
What impressed me most, though, was the breadth—not depth—of its knowledge.
That broad coverage made it possible to bring a small dream to reality.
Thanks for reading. Have a great day!