Gmail and Google Calendar Icons

I’ve written about Prism before but in spite of a great many things going for it one thing that is frustrating is the way it generates icons for your web app. Unless you have one you can pass to it it’ll just use the favicon of whatever site it’s asked to display. While this might work for the icon that sits in the Windows taskbar, every time you CTRL-Tab you’re going to be reminded this is a nasty hack job.

What’s a guy to do? Well if you’re obsessed with the way things look on your computer then you’ll have a search for some good Windows icons. When you can’t find any (unbelievably) you’ll then start looking for icons for other platforms (where by ‘other’ I mean ‘Mac OS X’).

It turns out there’s quite a healthy community of designers producing icons for the Mac site specific browser Fluid and that with a little hacking these icons can be turned into something us plebs on Windows can use.

So here’s a zip file of both Google icons together!

(Please note that in order for these to work properly you’ll have to overwrite the webapp.ico files in ‘Application Data\Web Apps\..\icons\default\’ [where '..' is the name of your web app]. The Application Data folder is a hidden folder in your user directory. I realise that’s a pain but it’s Prism’s fault!)

Now of course credit where credit is due. The original Gmail icon was the work of the amazing Chris Ivarson. In the case of the Google Calendar icon all credit must go to Tim Malabuyo who, like me, just wanted something that looked as good as Chris’ Gmail icon. I must also give a huge shout out to IcoFX which is the absolute best icon editor I’ve ever used (and it’s free!).