December, 2008

File and folder icons are an important part of the look and feel of the Mac. These icons are available to Java applications through several different classes in Swing and sometimes as UI defaults for Apple's "Mac OS X" look and feel. This article shows to how to get at these icons using Java on a Mac.

Part of the Mac look and feel is the use of standard icons across many applications, like the color wheel for the color picker, or the gear for advanced settings. To promote uniformity across Mac applications, Apple provides these icons via their NSImage class in the AppKit toolkit for Objective C. This article shows how to get at these same standard icons using Java on a Mac.