Script Grabs Hi-Res Icons For Any iOS App You Like

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This post is a little “inside baseball,” as it’s about a new tool for grabbing high-res app icons direct from the command line (or using an app), and this is the kind of thing that is most useful to writers like me. Then again, it’s by Brett ‘I just built this’ Terpstra, the Hardest Working Man on the Internet™, and is plain ingenious, so lets take a look.

Grab the script and run it from the command line to get the icon for any app you like:

This script uses iTunes search API to locate the best match possible for entered keywords, so you don’t need to paste in a URL or anything. Just enter something like:

itunesicon.rb super monsters ate my condo

The result will be written out to a file named based on your search terms, in all of its high-resolution glory.

The results are square, not rounded with a bezel, so you’ll need to mask it if you want it to appear the way it does on iTunes.

There’s also a version packaged up as an app using Automator (you knew that you could paste a shell script into Automator and save it as an app, right?), so you never need to actually open a Terminal window.

Intrepid Mac users can tweak the ending of the script to open the downloaded picture in Acorn, Gus Mueller’s amazing image editor, and mask it automatically. Brett has some basic instructions in his post (hint: dragging an app onto Acorn opens all its image resources in a little window for your to browse).

Inside baseball? Sure. But if you have been screen-grabbing these pictures or worse, googling for non-web-shrunken versions, then the script is going to be super-duper useful.

Source: Brett Terpstra

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