Plus and minus images

Description

Many Mac applications come with plus and minus buttons, for adding and removing items from a list.

But Apple does not make these icons available to developers. Some create custom icons that look nothing like the originals. I think this breaks consistency. Another solution is to copy the image from wherever in the OS it's stored, but this breaches copyright. The third solution is to directly reference those files, but that's fragile, as Apple can and does change pathnames to OS files without warning.

The obvious solution is to create a pair of images that look like the Apple ones, and then offer them to all developers to use in their apps for free.

This is exactly what I have done.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Public Domain License.

I'm releasing these images into the public domain so that anybody can use them. You don't have to ask me. You don't have to pay me anything. Just grab 'em and use 'em.

The images

The PNGs shown here are 8×8, which is fit for a 20-pt-tall button. The button should be a “Small Square Button”, as Interface Builder calls it, also known as NSSmallSquareBezelStyle (AppKit) and [I think] kThemeBevelButtonInset (Carbon).

• : Photoshop format, 8×8 PNG format
• : Photoshop format, 8×8 PNG format

On file size: The plus PNG is 82 bytes, and the minus PNG is 75 bytes (thanks SuperPNG!) Note: bytes. With no prefix. So including these in your app will not significantly increase its size.

(The images from 2006-04-19 weighed 607 and 601 bytes respectively, because I had mistakenly left them in RGB mode in Photoshop. On 2006-06-28, I published the corrected version; they are now grayscale, leading to the current small sizes.)

Modifying

• The images are full black, with the gray expressed in the alpha channel.
• The thickness of the lines is 2 pixels.
• Scaling will throw off the line thickness, so you should change the size by cropping (with the center of the crop being equal to the center of the image), and then duplicating the horizontal and vertical segments to fill any newly-created space.
• Keep the size of the image to a multiple of two. Otherwise the image will appear imbalanced.
• The size of the image should be the height of the button minus 12 (for example, a 20-pt-tall button gets an 8-pt image). The width of the button doesn't matter.

2006-06-28 http://boredzo.org/buttonicons