Using an LLM to Automate the Process of Archiving New macOS App Icons

Whenever a new version of macOS drops, I find myself archiving the new app icons for my macOS icon gallery. In the past, the work to do this was a bit tedious. First, I’d find the app in the “Applications” folder (or elsewhere on the Mac), right click and choose “Get Info”: Right-click the app icon in the Get Info pane and choose “Copy”: Open the Preview app and go “File -> New from Clipboard”: This gets me the app icon file with a variety of sizes (the 1024-pixel version is the one I want). From here, I go “File -> Export…”, choose “PNG”, and name the file as the app name, lowercased, hyphenated — e.g. “app-store.png” (I do this for automation purposes not relevant here). Doing that for every Apple-supplied app in the OS can get tiring. It’s often upwards of 75+ icons. “This seems like the perfect task for an LLM,” I thought. So I hastily wrote a prompt to see if it could do it. And it did — sort of, after a little coaching. On the first try it found an app’s .icns file, grabbed the…

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