Secrects of Apple Icons — Take a Closer Look

As an Apple fan, you might think you know enough about Apple because you have seen enough Apple’s amazingly elegant products. However, when we look closer, there will be more things for you to be amazed.

One of the reasons why Apple products are becoming more and more popular is because, they are well designed especially focusing on the small little details that could enhance the simplicity. There are tons of ingenious details we might miss through our daily use of Mac. Let’s take a look at them today.

TextEdit:

Usually if you use TextEdit, you will just notice there is a letter paper, a pen and a paragraph on that piece of paper. Have you ever been able to read what’s actually written on it? If you are using Snow Leopard, you can enlarge the icon to 512*512 and take a look; it’s not simply a blurry paragraph that you can’t read.

Dear Kate,

Here’s to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.
Because they change things.

Take Care,
John Appleseed

This is a letter from John Appleseed to Kate. If you are a hard-core Apple fans, you might be quite familiar with this letter. It’s actually the text from the advertisement “Think Different” by Apple. Then who is John Appleseed? There is no official answer but most of the people will think it’s the John who brought Apple into the US. Note: John brought in the editable Apple into most of the regions in United Stated States, not the computer.

Keynote:

Similar as TextEdit, Keynote also has a paragraph on the keynote in the icon. The header is easy to read, which is “Q4 2009″, meaning the speech for the Quarter 4 2009. But the words are too small, even if you enlarge it to the maximum size, you could barely read it. Actually, it’s a lyrics from “The Bitch of Living” by Spring Awakening.

God, I dreamed there was an angel Who could hear me through the wall As I cried out-like, in Latin “This is so not life at all Help me out-out-of this nightmare” Then I heard her silver call- She said: “Just give it time, kid I come to one and all”

She said: “Give me that hand, please And the itch you can’t control Let me teach you how to handle All the sadness in your soul Oh, we’ll work that silver magic Then we’ll aim it at the wall” She said: “Love may make you blind kid- But I wouldn’t mind at all”

It’s the bitch of living (Bitch, just a bitch) With nothing but your hand (Just a bitch, yeah) Just the bitch of living As someone you can’t stand See, each night, it’s like fantastic- Tossing, turning, without rest

However, no one knows why this song was chosen unless answer is released from Apple.

Mail:

Mail.app is pretty easy. There is a postmark on the stamp that says “HELLO FROM CUPERTINO, CA”. That means the greeting email is out from Cupertino; just for your reference, the location of Apple Inc. is 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA, USA‎.

iTunes:

In iTunes 7 and iTunes 8, there are some words on the inner plastic parts of the DVD, reads “APPLE 2006 ITUNES 7″. This is to celebrate iTunes 7 was released in July 2006. However, when iTunes 8 was introduced later, the words on the icon didn’t got updated.

One more disappointing thing to say is that, the words in the icon for iTunes 9 were completely removed.

iCal:

If you don’t put your iCal onto your dock (for example, if you browser your iCal icon in your “Application” folder), you will see the date is July 17th instead of your current date. Just like iTunes 7, the date is to let people remember iCal was introduced in Macworld Expo by Apple in New York City on July 17th, 2002.

PhotoBooth:

In the third photo, the lady smiles much better than the previous two with glasses in the photos outside of the photo booth.

Is Apple telling people try to be relax when using PhotoBooth so that more natural photos will come up?

SystemProfile:

There is some model number printed on the chip in the icon of SystemProfile. It contains three lines:

810-54-2136-1

RM-NCE-1

6319-415-1239

I tried to find out the what these numbers/letters mean, but nothing really useful was found. If you look more carefully, you should be able to find the same chip is also on the icon of “Macbook (Or other Mac) EFI Update” and “SuperDrive Update”:

Aperture:

Last but not least, I would like to show you what I have found on the icon of Aperture.

On the outside ring of the lens, there are two lines of words that you could read by click on the icon to enlarge it. It says “Designed by Apple in California” and “50mm 1:1.4″. Nice lens, Apple!

Post Note:

Icons designing in the system is just a very tiny portion of the UI design, but Apple takes them very seriously. Sometimes I might think that Apple is actually over doing what’s already perfect. For example, who cares if there only a pen and a piece of letter paper on the icon of TextEdit; no one is going to complain as long as TextEdit is providing the same features. Yet, Apple is doing that; it’s not going to enhance the system, but once you know it, you will be amazed.