Changing/customizing application icons was pretty straightforward in OSX Leopard. It’s not any harder to do in Snow Leopard – all you need to do extra is to temporarily change permissions on an app in order to replace the icon.

Here’s how: ‘Get Info’ of an app (Cmd-I), unlock permissions (click lock icon at the bottom of Info window; requires admin password) and change permissions of user ‘everyone’ to Read & Write.

Now you can paste in the new icon from the clipboard, return the permissions back to “Read Only” and lock the permissions.

If you’re not yet familiar with replacing icons, here’s a short how-to:

1. Open the file containing icon graphics (PNG, JPEG,…) in Preview. Naturally, it’s best if this file is a PNG file with transparent background. For instance, you can find some PNG icon files for Fluid apps on Flickr.

2. In Preview, select the graphic (Cmd-A) and crop if needed, then copy to clipboard (Cmd-C):

3. In Info window of the app whose icon you wish to replace, click on the top left icon to select it:

4. Paste the graphic from the clipboard over the selected icon (Cmd-V):

Done:

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