Icon Cast 1.6 Sooner than We Planned

Wow. That was fast. It is just two weeks since 1.5 and Icon Cast 1.6 is already here. We have released sooner than we planned but there are still some useful features that made it to 1.6.

I have to admit. We haven't quite hit the mark with 1.5. Some of our users experienced issues when upgrading from older versions. This bug caused the search to stop working. Which is a remarkable limitation for an app that you use for finding icons. There is a workaround that involves having fun with Finder and the filesystem. That is not great.*

Get the latest Icon Cast version on Mac App Store or try it for free.

Base 64 Export

Along with PNGs and SVGs you can now export icons in base 64 encoding. You can use base 64 encoding to embed images directly into HTML. This is suitable for smaller icons. While base 64 encoding takes a bit extra space compared to  but saves additional HTML requests for individual images.

Base 64 encoded image inside HTML in an IDE

When choosing base 64 encoding. Icon Cast puts to you keyboard text that you can paste directly into the <img> src attribute or to any CSS property that expects an image.

Just use commons sense when using base 64 icons. They safe a bit of traffic when used for smaller icons that appear once in you app. With icon a size, repetitive use of the same icon and browser caches the advantage of using embedded icons can become a disadvantage.

Usability Improvements

We were always proud how you can quickly you can find an icon in Icon Cast and get it into your clipboard. Super fast search and keyboard shortcuts make that possible. We have added few more useful shortcuts.

Starting with 1.6 can use keyboard shortcuts also to:

• Open individual color pickers
• Swap the two primary colors
• Switch icons to black

You can check all the new shortcuts in the new Style menu.

The new convenient Style menu

You can now also keep application background synced with the icons background. Plus there are a few visual improvements in the user interface.

Icon Cast with different backgrounds

New Icons

We started to work on food and healthcare categories mostly. As we decided to release early there are more to come in 1.7. Check the new icons below.

Icons added in Icon Cast 1.6

Start using Icon Cast and share your thoughts. You can buy it from Mac App Store or try it for free.

* The funny thing is that I had already started to write a blog post about how we can easily test upgrades to make them really smooth. So I will have to make few changes to it to reflect reality before we post it :)