IconHarvester: The Easiest And Prettiest Way To Change Your iPhone App Icons

In the jailbreak community, there are plenty of ways to change the way that your iPhone interface looks. Icons especially are a large part of the iOS interface that people like to tweak to their liking.

Once jailbroken, you can do all kinds of things to your iPhone’s icons. You can convert old app icons to retina display icons, arrange the way they look on your home screen in any way you want, and the list goes on and on.

Themes via apps like WinterBoard also allow you to change your icons to suit different looks. IconHarvester, by NanoTech, is a relatively unknown jailbreak app that focuses specifically on icon-theming. It’s elegant and simple interface make it well worth the price for any icon lover…

IconHarvester is very pretty and easy to use. Never before has installing and customizing icons for the iPhone been this simple.

IconHarvester works in tandem with WinterBoard to theme your iPhone’s icons. All of the initial theme searching and customization happens in IconHarvester, and then the theme is installed through WinterBoard.

When you first open IconHarvester, you are greeted by a list of installable themes, complete with their own custom icons, for your iPhone. The list of themes is searchable and all are free to install.

IconHarvester does not use Cydia’s index of WinterBoard themes, it has its own database. That means that there is finally a simple, easily viewable database of all the best themes. All of the classics, like Glasklart and Tetra, are there, along with some really nice ones that you probably didn’t know existed.

Unlike the traditional method of searching in Cydia, IconHarvester offers live previews of all themes within the app. That’s right, no more installing theme after theme to see if you really like the way it looks with your app setup. You can see before you install a theme, thanks to IconHarvester.

Simply select a theme, and scroll through all of its available icons and see the way they look. You can browse themes by looking through the list, or by swiping from left to right through each theme’s preview window.

If you decide you want to install a theme, IconHarvester’s installation process couldn’t be simpler. Hit the install button at the top right of the screen, and confirm that you want to download the desired WinterBoard theme. The theme’s icons and templates will begin downloading to your iPhone.

Once downloaded, the theme will be available for customization within IconHarvester.

All of the theme’s icons are collected for you in a preview window. IconHarvester pushes theme updates to you as more icons are made available by the theme’s developer.

After a theme is installed, that’s where the real fun begins. IconHarvester allows you to customize icons on an app-by-app level. Lots of themes have multiple icons for certain apps. In IconHarvester, you can easily view those alternate icons and choose which ones you want for each app.

Some themes have more alternate icons than others, but if you find a really robust theme with lots of icons, IconHarvester is a dream. When you’re scrolling through your available icons, you can tap and hold on one to get the original name of the app. Applying an icon is as simple as scrolling it into the middle column of the customize window.

Another really cool feature of IconHarvester is its ability to generate alternate icons for apps that may not have icons specifically designed by the developer. If an original, themed icon can’t be found for the app you want, IconHarvester will generate one by combining the app’s original icon with special template images provided with many popular themes. The result is the most fully customized icon collection possible.

After you have your icons the way you want them, close IconHarvester and head over to WinterBoard to apply your customized theme.

The final WinterBoard step is very important to the IconHarvester process. SummerBoard mode must be switched on in WinterBoard for IconHarvester’s customized themes to work. This provides greater compatibility with older themes.

Once you have selected your customized theme in WinterBoard, simply respring your iPhone and your iconalicious theme should be applied.

All of this icon goodness isn’t necessarily cheap, IconHarvester will run you $4.99 in the Cydia Store. However, for any theme junkie, I would say that it’s definitely worth the price.

The developers behind IconHarvester have a great trailer for the newest version of the app. Head over to the official IconHarvester website for more information about the app’s capabilities. There’s also a nice FAQ and theme installation guide available for your learning pleasure.

With other tools like Icon Renamer, you have lots of control over the way your iPhone’s icons can look.

What do you think about IconHarvester?