Wouldn’t it be great if Apple released an app that we could use to customize the look of the operating system? Just imagine that for a bit. Think of how you’d tailor your experience. Think of the abundance of different themes that people would post on the internet for everyone else to use. Hey, think about how many roundups we would write up!
Sadly for us, the ability to theme our system’s interface has never been an easy or flawless task. Sure, we had Manifique and a few apps like it, but now they are gone. That’s why icon customizers are still interesting, since tweaking icons is one of the best ways you can still tweak your Mac experience.
iCondubber is dubbed as the “definitive icon/theme manager”, and while it probably isn’t the “definitive” icon manager, it is without a doubt a helpful and useful tool. Let’s take a look, and see if it’s worth trying out.
The Icon/Dock Customizer
iCondubber allows you to customize a sea of icons throughout your Mac, as well as the dock and some other smaller pieces of UI. Some of these icons you’ve probably never seen, but others will be familiar to you. Upon selecting the icon you want to change, you can drag and drop the new icon to replace the older one. You don’t even need to worry about what kind of file it is. Once you are done replacing icons, simply hit install and you’re done. Your computer won’t need to reboot or logout, it’ll only reload your desktop (it may quit some applications in the process, though).
Switching just about any icon in your system is painless, but iCondubber does have its issues here and there. For instance, when you want to change an individual folder’s icon, there seems to be no easy way to achieve this. The website does say that you can do this, even outside of the app, but I can’t seem to find how. What I did instead was to change a random icon and then select “assign as thumbnail to” from the settings and pick the folder that I wanted. Odd, right?
This is perhaps one of iCondubber’s biggest pitfalls. The lack of guidance, assistance, and user friendliness is tremendously frustrating. Usually when playing with any new application, the application itself can be forward and easy to use, or the application’s website has a few tutorials or samples of what you can do, but iCondubber is not very well documented. This isn’t particularly horrible for most applications, but for one that is tweaking things that otherwise shouldn’t be touched, it makes you feel less daring.
Although your learning process will be a bit daunting because of the lack of documentation, as you get comfortable with the application you will be able to use this app to create themes that you can then mix and match to turn your normal-looking UI into something unique.
Which brings me to a rather personal observation. Upon installing iCondubber, you are presented with the message in the image above. Now, a lot of apps probably have this somewhere in the agreement, but for the developer to put it in huge red letters, front and center, it only makes me think that perhaps I shouldn’t even be installing this application in the first place. This message can turn many people off, but those that know what they are doing will probably ignore it.
The Looks
While iCondubber’s UI is simple, it honestly doesn’t have the same eye candy that other apps like it do. Discovering all the icons on your system is easy, though, and they are even displayed nicely with animation, but they aren’t exactly self explanatory.
Once you start to mess around with it, you are gonna have to do a bit of trial and error to figure out what the end product is gonna look like. There is no visual aid to help you with how your dock will end up looking. This may lead to many desktop restarts until you get use to the layout.
The Verdict
iCondubber isn’t perfect, but it does get the job done, and it’ll only cost you zero dollars. Ultimately, it really comes down to how easy of an experience you want to have. All the icons listed on the app can be changed with ease, but going beyond that can be a learning curve some won’t want to undertake. Nevertheless, if you’ve wanted a free way to tweak the icons on your mac, iCondubber may be just the app for you.