I like eye candy, especially in icon form. That's why I was excited to see that The Icon Factory released some Matrix icons to celebrate the release of the Matrix Revolutions DVD. Unfortunately, the only available icon formats were standard Windows icons (.ico) and Mac OS X-specific formats. Neither of these were useful to me, so I set out to convert these icons to a more portable format — PNG.
I chose to use the standard Macintosh Icons available from the Icon Factory. They turned out to be the easiest format for me to convert and still retain the alpha transparency.
You will need to download and install a few programs in order for this conversion to work. For those of you morally opposed to using close-source software, shame on you for even considering using Macintosh icons on your Linux desktop. Begone with you! (Just kidding, we still love you.)
First, you need to get a trial version of StuffIt for Linux. This is the closed-source software I mentioned above. As far as I know, this is the only package that will extract the Macintosh .bin files under linux. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.
Next, download yourself a copy of icns2png. This handy little tool is the key to success.
I've written a small shell script that will do all of the manual work that goes into successfully converting the Macintosh icons to PNG. You can skip ahead and download the final product or keep reading to see the process in action.
Extracting the .bin/.hqx
The first step in the process is to extract the data to disk so we can work with it. Unstuffing the data is actually a two-step process. The first time we unstuff the file, it deflates into a .data and .info file. I'm not sure what specifically is contained in the .info file, but we can disregard it. The second step will actually extract the icon data to a temporary directory.
