In October last year, I started working on a new version of Pixadex with Johannes. For those who are unfamiliar, Pixadex was an icon-organizer app interoperable with CandyBar, an icon-changing app. Both came from a legendary partnership between the Iconfactory and Panic.
I have missed these apps so much.


Screenshot of Pixadex 4, with collections listed on the left, showing icons inside the “Pixadex” collection on the right: CandyBar, its icontainer, Pixadex, its icontainer, a generic collection icon, a new icontainer, smart icontainer, and a private icontainer.

So much of my early computer life was spent collecting icons from a global community of icon designers who really just seemed to make them for fun. Of course, I made my own too, but 20 years later, I feel like I’m one of the only people still doing it for fun.
It’s been almost 18 years since CandyBar 3, the version that merged Pixadex and CandyBar functionality. Though the app still works today only as an icon organizer, it’s not in active development and has been discontinued for about 13 years. It scares me to think of one day losing the ability to view my icon collection. These are miniature pieces of art.

There’s a few things I wanted this new version to do, and a lot of things I didn’t need. We added a gallery view, just like Finder. We included more settings for snapping to specific icon sizes in both the sidebar list and in the view itself.


A screenshot of Pixadex 4’s gallery view, with a strip of small icons along the bottom and a large icon to inspect detail in the center.

There’s even a low-resolution simulator to enjoy icons from the days of yore. It’s quite clever, I think! Every odd pixel is darkened, and then to compensate for the darker pixels, the content view is pumped with HDR to maintain a relatively consistent brightness with the rest of the screen. It’s hard to show it to you here, so you’ll have to trust me for now.
Another thing I wanted to do was upgrade the .icontainer file format. An older .icontainer was a binary that was inaccessible outside of Pixadex and CandyBar (which had their own respective .icontainer sub-types). A newer .icontainer is a package. It can be opened and the contents retrieved, even without the app, making it a more future-proof format. I really don’t want to lose access to these icons as time goes on. Wade from Panic helped me understand the original .icontainer format, which I really appreciate. Thank you.


A screenshot of a Finder window with lots of new icontainers, and a context menu showing “Show Package Contents,” allowing a user to retrieve the ICNS files within.

As for changing icons, the app supports the old QuickDrop feature, which lets users drag a folder or hard drive onto the QuickDrop area, changing that item’s icon to whatever the current selected icon is in the app. But the app does not support changing icons the system otherwise doesn’t want people to change. This has long been the issue with CandyBar and other similar apps. It’s cat-and-mouse, and how long does anyone want to play that game as a developer?
I have lots of other ambitious ideas I want to pursue, but I don’t know if anyone else really wants a Pixadex 4. We made this mostly because I wanted it for myself. But if anyone else would find this useful, please drop me a line. It’d be good to know if this is worth investing more time in.

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