Product Reviews

The joint team that developed Pixadex, The Iconfactory and Panic, still likes to think of it as iPhoto for your icons. While it's true that Pixadex 2 performs that function - organising and classifying your collection of icons - this new version takes more of its interface cues from iTunes than from iPhoto.

For starters, the broad, gradient title bar follows the style of iTunes 5 (and 6), and when you perform a search a sub-bar appears beneath it allowing you to specify where in the file's metadata you want to search for your keyword - a trick introduced to great effect in iTunes 5.

Also new to this release is the ability to create nested folders, which is very useful if you're organised enough to catalogue your icons in the first place.

If you're running Mac OS X 10.4, you also get the ability to create Smart Collections. As with iTunes' Smart Playlists and iPhoto's Smart Albums, Pixadex 2 enables you to create groups of

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icons based on a certain criteria, such as copyright information, author or keywords. This is a handy feature, but we're not sure why it's limited to Tiger users. Sure, Pixadex 2 is integrated into Spotlight, so you can search for icons without having to launch the application and create Smart Folders using Pixadex's criteria. However, while we can understand this is a Tiger-only feature, even iTunes 6 runs on OS X 10.2, and it features the ability to generate Smart Playlists. We had hoped that making the application Spotlight-aware would speed up browsing and searching when working with moderately large (1000-plus) icon libraries, but this hasn't happened. In fact, when viewing Smart Collections (which must update each time they're viewed) on a mid-range G4 system, we were shocked by how slowly Pixadex built the collection.

There are some feature enhancements to sweeten the deal. You can view icons as a list, print individual icons and collections, and scan for duplicate icons. We also like the ability to drop in a variety of images, including Photoshop-format files, to convert them into icons, which is a good, quick-and-dirty icon-creation method. Plus, of course, all of the core functionality is still there from earlier versions, such as the QuickDrop area to allow you quickly to change a file or folder's icon.

If you don't own a copy, Pixadex 2 is a good investment; but while the upgrade for existing users is hardly extortionate, we're not sure there's that much extra here to justify even a fiver's expenditure.