Hatch Tweetbot for Mac’s Egg Icon Into A Blue Robot Bird [How-To]

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Get rid of that alpha egg and get the bird icon Tweetbot for Mac before it hatches.
Get rid of that alpha egg and get the bird icon Tweetbot for Mac before it hatches.

One of the many clever little touches accompanying last week’s official unveiling of the Tweetbot alpha for Mac was the icon: signifying’s the app’s alpha status, the blue robotic bird icon we all know and love on iOS was replaced with a metallic silver egg. Get it? Because it’s still not hatched.

I still love that joke, and it’s a great example of the little things Tapbots does that sets them apart from the rest… but I have to say, over the course of the last week using Tweetbot as my Mac Twitter client, I’ve missed having Tweetbot’s iconic blue bird in my dock. Here’s how to give Tweetbot for Mac the same icon as on iOS.

1. First, pick which Tweetbot bird icon you want. There’s two to choose from: the one from iOS, and the official Mac icon (i.e. the one that Tweetbot for Mac’s alpha egg will eventually hatch into). You can see them both in the image above. I prefer the iOS icon, but the other version is the one Tapbots will use on the Mac when 1.0 hits. You can download the iOS icon here and the Mac icon here (courtesy of Coding Massacre.

2. Once you’ve downloaded the icon, right-click on the Tweetbot icon under Applications/ and click “Show package contents.”

3. Under Contents/Resources/ find the file named AppIcon-alpha.icns and rename it AppIcon-alpha.old. This way, if you decide to roll the icon back, you can do it.

4. Drag the new icon you downloaded into Contents/Resources/.

5. Quit Tweetbot if you haven’t already and restart it. You’ll have a blue bird for an icon!

Let us know how it works out for you, or if there are any problems.

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