Humans are collectors. From garbage to money, from antiques to quotes, from cars to clothes, human beings are inveterate collectors of everything.
I collect the less expensive Mac and iPhone apps. Some people collect photos of family members. Some Mac users collect icons. Not those icons. Mac icons. App icons. Icons of everything that resides on a Mac or PC. Why? Because they can. And InerziaIcon makes it easy.
Collecting For Fun But No Profit
To be fair about my fetish for collecting Mac and iPhone apps, I also have a small collection of icons from Icon Factory to go along with my installation of CandyBar.
What I found is that serious icon collectors need a tool to collect, manage, and view icons.
InerziaIcon is a simple tool that does exactly that. Think of it as iTunes for icons. Any Mac user can use iTunes, so InerxiaIcon is just as easy, and, like iTunes, it’s free.
Double click InerziaIcon to start and it scans your Mac from top to bottom (not literally—just the Mac’s hard disk drive) and comes back with an iTunes-like list of all the icons stored on your Mac.
InerziaIcon stores information about each icon, too. Ratings, name, location. Since Mac OS X Leopard Mac users have had access to much larger icons—512 x 512 pixels—which can be viewed in larger and more glorious detail using Quick Look.
Apps come with icons. Documents come with icons. Your Mac’s system has icons all over the place. InerziaIcon simply finds them and collects them in a convenient library.
If you’re really into Mac icons for design purposes, then you’ll like the free icon search app for the Mac from Icon Junkie (see? You’re not the only one who collects).
Serious icon collectors know about Icon Finder, the site with a few hundred thousand searchable icons. Icon Junkie is a Mac app that searches Icon Finder for more icons.
Another favorite Mac app is the not-so-free IconBurglar. It does what you think it does. It, uh, well, acquires icons from your Mac—the system, apps, files, folders, wherever. Even better, IconBurglar lets you view and resize icons and sound files, and save them for later viewing and using.
I don’t know why or when I started collecting icons, but the habit dates back to the Mac Classic days, but enhanced with the larger icon sizes in Mac OS X. It’s fun to see what designers can do with a mere 512 pixel square, but I don’t see much money in casual icon collections.
About Alexis Kayhill
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