Old icons

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Mac application icons and “squircle jail.” Inspired by this post from Paul Kafasis on the Rogue Amoeba blog,1 many Mac-adjacent people have taken up his cause to “Free the Icons.” I agree, but Apple’s 50th anniversary has gotten me thinking a lot lately about the early days of the Mac, so it’s only natural that my mind shifted to the highly constrained icons Mac applications had back then. In those days, icons were 32×32 pixel images, and every pixel was either black or white. The classic original Mac application icons were the ones for MacWrite and MacPaint.2 You can see that Apple liked the idea of app icons being a tilted rectangle with some image inside the rectangle to indicate what the app did. The hand was Apple’s way of telling you that this icon was for doing things, and the rectangle was tilted to match the orientation of the hand. (If you were left-handed, this was just another injustice inflicted on you by a cruel right-handed…