appicon-generator

A tool to quickly generate snazzy iOS placeholder appicons!

If you're an iOS developer like me, chances are that you also create tiny iOS app projects in Xcode all the time. Maybe it's an idea you'd like to try out, a toy for experimenting with a new iOS feature, maybe it's a micro-tool, maybe it's the alpha version of the next App Store blockbuster.

Suddenly your iOS simulators and your phone has a whole bunch of apps with the placeholder icon. That's not very nice. You don't have time for that. You're not a designer. You don't have Sketch. You just want something that looks ok for now.

Here's a tool that quickly generates app icons from a big set of beautifully crafted icons that are already on your computer. Open a shell, cd to your project directory and type:

$ appicon-generator 🐘

Now you have an elephant as an appicon. Nice.

Grab the zip from the releases page on Github, unzip and move appicon-generator into /usr/local/bin (or some other place you like to keep your binaries).

• appicon-generator will look for an Assets.xcassets directory, in the directory you're at or most one level down, and then generate an AppIcon.appiconset there, overwriting any existing data without asking. Commit your data if needed before using.
• Obviously, don't try to commit an app with an emoji as an icon to the App Store. They won't like that.

To build the tool, use swift build. Make sure to have your xcode-select version to Xcode 10 – as of this writing, I am using the beta 6 version.