Amy Worrall (Mastodon):

McKinley is an all-in-one studio for drawing and annotating SF Symbols. It bundles vector tools with knowledge of the SF Symbols structure, so you can edit one set of objects across multiple weights, sizes and colours. Import SVG or start from scratch, live preview your work using Apple’s own renderer, and export directly to Xcode, so you never need touch the SF Symbols app again!

[…]

Gone are the days of converting your strokes and shapes to outlined paths before export. Keep everything how you drew it, and let McKinley handle the output.

[…]

Link your project’s asset catalog to your McKinley document. Then when you make a change, hit the Sync keyboard shortcut and it’s immediately populated with your latest version.

[…]

McKinley is a Mac-assed Mac app: a native AppKit UI, Quick Look previews and thumbnails for your documents, a full AppleScript dictionary for batch work, and the whole user guide offline in Help.

$60, no subscription. It’s been a while since I had to deal with custom SF Symbols, but I remember it being a major pain. I haven’t had the chance to try McKinley with a real project yet, but it looks very well done. I love seeing a new app ship with documentation and extensive AppleScript support, including sample scripts that you can install right from its script menu.

Mario Guzmán:

The icon isn’t just a symbol but a whole artistic creation on a canvas.

Look at how your tools are on panels that could be individually opened on their own auxiliary window. I can’t stand the single-window, everything buried into a single-sidebar design we get these days.

Amy Worrall:

SF Symbols rendering does a surprising amount behind your back: it interpolates nine weights from three masters, applies optical size adjustments, resolves hierarchical opacity ladders, and changes some of this between OS releases. Any preview I rendered myself might diverge from the real thing in ways nobody would notice until the symbol was in an app looking subtly wrong. (Obviously I aim to get my canvas rendering with the exact same nuance as Apple’s renderer, but programmers are fallible and the fewer ways things can diverge, the better.)

Apple provides no API for “here’s my SVG, render it as a symbol”. For a normal app using a custom SF Symbol, the symbol is compiled from an Asset Catalog in Xcode into a .car file (a compiled asset catalog) at build time. But there’s no ‘build time’ when I want to update a preview in McKinley.

My workaround involves compiling your symbol into a .car file at runtime, on every edit, by patching bytes into a template, then loading that temporary .car file into McKinley via NSBundle.

Previously:

• Octavo 1.0
• SF Viewer Removed From the App Store
• SF Symbols

Update (2026-09-08): John Gruber:

I mean just look at McKinley. It’s both beautiful and quite obviously a serious professional tool.

Update (2026-09-11): Amy Worrall:

Anyone used any great implementations of dockable palettes? (Adobe’s don’t count, I don’t think they’re great!)

I’m not going to go back to sidebars, but some kind of options/flexibility might work, if it doesn’t get in the way!

Ryan Christoffel:

Last year with iOS 26, Apple redesigned its full lineup of app icons for iPhone. But just one year later, iOS 27 has even more design changes for many app icons.

[…]

iOS 27’s new app icons are “sharper and more detailed,” per Apple’s description. And it really shows.

Louie Mantia:

If you’re curious how much changed from 26 to 27 for app icon rendering with Icon Composer, here are a few examples of the difference (in this thread). First of the pair is 26, the second is 27.

Benjamin Mayo:

App icons also look significantly different now, but I think some of this is beta 1 bugs as the 27 rendering is very flat.

Andreas Storm:

All app icons are getting a Liquid Glass update

Louie Mantia:

The needless, barely-even-noticeable directional specular highlights based on the rotation of your phone on app icons are gone in iOS 27, and thank god for that.

Kuba Suder:

Ohhhh they made app icons sharper! That was one of the things that stood out to me, some were sooo blurry… my mom noticed it too on her new iPad.

Mario Guzmán:

I will say that icons render better in #macOS27 so some of these icons look super sharp, super glassy, super sophisticated. Almost like something you’d buy at the Swarovski store.

I mean, look at this icon! Look at it closely. Zoom in. Almost gives me Mac OS X Tiger detail vibes.

• • •

Thomas Brand:

All I wanted from WWDC was release from squircle jail.

Simon B. Støvring:

Just f***ng free macOS app icons from squircle jail already.

• • •

Icon Composer for Beginners Group Lab:

Join us online to ask questions, get advice, and follow the discussion about getting started with Icon Composer.

Previously:

• Liquid Glass 27 Slider
• macOS Golden Gate 27 Announced
• iPadOS 27 Announced
• iOS 27 Announced
• WWDC 2026 Keynote

Update (2026-06-11): Ged Maheux:

I appreciate Apple wiping the vaseline off the screen for iOS 27. App icons seem significantly less fuzzy, especially in light mode, which is a good thing.

Kuba Suder:

I think they dragged the sharpness slider too far in some cases, and some lines are too strong and too visible, but imho generally this is a change in a good direction (if it also scales well to various sizes). Some of those icons were annoyingly blurry in 26.

Jonathan Reed:

The clarity and legibility of almost all the icons have improved significantly, with icons like Photos packing a real visual punch. Additionally, viewing the icons at this size, you can see the nice refraction effects of the glass-like elements.

The one that really stood out for me, though, was the new Finder icon, which not only looks cleaner but also has a subtle change to the nose and the curve of the divide, bringing it much closer to the classic Finder icon from the pre-Liquid Glass days.

Basic Apple Guy:

Here are a list of many of the icons across macOS Golden Gate (beta 1) compared to their liquid glass Tahoe counterpart.

Update (2026-06-16): Marcus Mendes:

Following Monday’s WWDC6 keynote, Apple updated its Design Resources portal with assets for iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 Golden Gate.

Notably missing were explicit download links to the SF Symbols 8 beta and the Icon Composer 2 beta. However, both are available to download, and you can get them below:

• Download SF Symbols 8 beta
• Download Icon Composer 2 beta

Update (2026-07-06): Louie Mantia:

In Icon Composer, effects are determined at a group level. Components within groups can only turn on/off effects wholesale.

If I choose “individual” on the group, I get individual specular highlights (great), but I also get individual shadows (not great).

If I choose “combined” on the group, I get a combined shadow (great), but I also get also get a combined specular highlight (not great).

I can’t win unless I bake in the specular highlight, which defeats the purpose.