Jonas' Tumblr

"This analogy is not entirely hopeless. Alaska and Norway blunt the resource curse by proactively..."

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 22:17:18 +0200

“This analogy is not entirely hopeless. Alaska and Norway blunt the resource curse by proactively distributing the proceeds of resource extraction, limiting concentrated control and ensuing disorders. “Technology” is not a tangible thing that can be publicly owned and sold for proceeds. But like oil in the ground, it is a resource the scale of whose product far exceeds the reward required to incentivize its production. If we imagine technology as a source of value embedded in most goods and services, we can distribute claims upon it simply by distributing new purchasing power. A money-financed basic income would amount to a partial dispersion of technological bounty from those involved in concentrated production to “outsiders”. Like Norway’s Oil Fund, this might help preserve balance, economically and politically, in the face of our creeping resource curse.”

- The generalized resource curse – interfluidity

"I worked at Facebook from 2005 to 2010 in a series of roles culminating in a position as..."

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 11:56:43 +0200

“I worked at Facebook from 2005 to 2010 in a series of roles culminating in a position as Zuckerberg’s speechwriter, and had an opportunity to observe the development of Facebook both as a social media platform and as what it increasingly aims to become: a global leader on par with nations. “Companies over countries,” Zuckerberg often said in meetings”

- Kate Losse for Dissent Magazine: Feminism’s Tipping Point: Who Wins from Leaning in? (via iamdanw)

"In 1995, Chairman Lee was dismayed to learn that cell phones he gave as New Year’s gifts were found..."

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 20:24:33 +0200

“In 1995, Chairman Lee was dismayed to learn that cell phones he gave as New Year’s gifts were found to be inoperable. He directed underlings to assemble a pile of 150,000 devices in a field outside the Gumi factory. More than 2,000 staff members gathered around the pile. Then it was set on fire. When the flames died down, bulldozers razed whatever was remaining. ‘If you continue to make poor-quality products like these,’ Lee Keon Hyok recalls the chairman saying, ‘I’ll come back and do the same thing.’”

- How Samsung Became the World’s No. 1 Smartphone Maker (via petervidani)

Speaking of open protocols and data formats, iMessage being an Apple product is unfortunately as...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 23:57:16 +0100

Speaking of open protocols and data formats, iMessage being an Apple product is unfortunately as closed as it gets, but it’s just too convenient not to use. In order to at least avoid data loss, I tried to figure out how to get my iMessage (and SMS) logs from my iOS devices. Here’s the nerdy version without using proprietary tools or jailbreaking and assuming you only have encrypted backups on your Mac.

And while I was playing around with sqlite databases anyway: exporting a list of your favorite podcast episodes from Instacast 2.

On a side note, since I’m not a native speaker, I will always be grateful if you point out...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 15:01:00 +0100

On a side note, since I’m not a native speaker, I will always be grateful if you point out spelling or other mistakes in my posts so that I can fix them and improve my English skills.

Google Reader, open protocols and public utilities

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:55:00 +0100

Over the last few days following Google’s announcement about the shutdown of Google Reader, a discussion emerged about using Google (and cloud) services going forward.

Some people consider not even trying out new Google products anymore as they now fear that those might be shutdown within a few years again anyway.

Om Malik clarifies that it isn’t so much about Google services in general but specificially about the various side projects they launch and kill again and again:

“It is hard to trust Google anymore to make rational and consumer centric decisions. I said — nuanced as it might be — that I don’t trust Google to introduce new apps and keep them around, because despite what the company says, these apps are not their main business. Their main business is advertising and search — regardless of whatever nonsense you might read.”

You might have a better chance if you choose a service from a company that primarily provides what you use and it isn’t just a side project for them:

“The point is that a company whose main focus is a specific service or a singular product, like Evernote, is far more likely to focus its energies to build a business around it and keep it around.”

As Marco Arment and Andrew Turner point out, this isn’t really about Google but in general about proprietary services and businesses. The best thing you can do is to not rely on those services by always using open protocols and data formats and making sure you can always export your data to move it elsewhere:

“The point is that we must realize the vitalness of protecting and accessing our data. Whether my personal notes, email, photos, business plans, or any other information that I have, it is imperative that we retain ownership and rights to the underlying data. Users should be able to hold their data with permission to access, use and reuse regardless of future business decisions.”

Krugman and Ryan Avent contemplate if Google is starting to provide infrastructure that the public relies upon but Google might loose interest in providing:

“So what’s the answer? As Avent says, historical examples with these characteristics — like urban transport networks — have been resolved through public provision. It seems hard at this point to envision search and related functions as public utilities, but that’s arguably where the logic will eventually lead us.”

Izabella Kaminska adds that the concept of services turning into public utilities applies elsewhere as well, for example banks and maybe even general media (journalism?).

"Moleskine’s operating margin, its profit as a percentage of revenue, was 41.7% last year. That..."

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 19:28:00 +0100

“Moleskine’s operating margin, its profit as a percentage of revenue, was 41.7% last year. That compares favorably—indeed, very favorably—to the luxury brands the company considers to be peers, like luggage-maker Tumi (19.7%), fashion firm Prada (27.2%), and beauty-product boutique L’Occitane (16.7%). It’s not hard to see why. The raw goods of Moleskine’s paper products, which represent 93% of the company’s revenue, are cheap compared to most luxury wares, so there’s more room to mark up the price.”

- Everything you need to know about Moleskine ahead of its IPO Apparently you can achieve software-like margins in 2013 by selling paper of all things.

"Over the last week I’ve read Colin Woodard’s “American Nations - A History of the Eleven Rival..."

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 22:08:44 +0100

“Over the last week I’ve read Colin Woodard’s “American Nations - A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America”. This book was absolutely fascinating. The author’s hypothesis is that the original cultures defined when the first settlers arrived in the new world continue to largely define modern North American (he covers what is today the US, Canada and northern Mexico) politics.”

- Ed Freyfogle’s blog: Book review: “American Nations” by Colin Woodard

I haven’t read the book, but the underlying idea got me thinking how this could be applied to Europe and the EU (here are a few short descriptions of the different American regions and their political preferences). I’ve always been a big fan of the EU and European integration, but obviously the process has run into difficulties lately and it isn’t clear how things will continue once the Euro crisis is resolved. If you look at things like the different welfare state systems across Europe, it’s clear that at least historically there have been different preferences and I wonder how deeply they are ingrained in each culture and thus how far the European integration will be able to go. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen, partial integration can also be very dangerous (Euro crisis: monetary integration without a central banking regulator and fiscal integration), so I’m not yet sure what future integration should look like.

"Thus Utilitarian Ethics was born. It is a familiar thought pattern for us, but for Machiavelli (and..."

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 20:25:40 +0100

“Thus Utilitarian Ethics was born. It is a familiar thought pattern for us, but for Machiavelli (and Europe at that point) it was a completely new idea, never thought before. What if this is good? This act that, by destroying a terrible, wicked, monster of a man, saved a hundred thousand lives? How can I call it evil? What if I want to judge the act, not by what it was (betrayal, murder), but by what it did, save Italy (and Florence!) and the world from the Borgia menace. And if Julius had done the “good” thing, and kept Cesare going, and let all that evil happen when he had the power to stop it with one dark command, could we really call that “good”? And what of virtue ethics? Why do I care whether Julius betrayed Cesare for selfish or selfless reasons–he still saved Italy, and so many, many lives. Doesn’t that matter? Doesn’t the consequence of an act, its utility, factor into the moral equation? I think, he says, it does.
This is the advice Machiavelli writes for the Medici when the forced retirement of exile gives him time to write a new Handbook of Princes for a new kind of prince: the princes of Florence, whose duty is to protect Florence–beautiful, unique, burgeoning, irreplaceable Florence–and her citizens–artists, philosophers, poets, statesmen, craftsmen–from the perils of conquest and extermination which constantly threaten her fragile walls.”

- Machiavelli IV: Julius II, The Warrior Pope

If you’d like to read about the power dynamics in Italy 500 years ago and how popes were “elected” back then, this great Machiavelli series is for you.

Last fall, Marco Arment launched a general interest magazine. It’s called, aptly enough,...

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 21:52:00 +0100

Last fall, Marco Arment launched a general interest magazine. It’s called, aptly enough, The Magazine. Writers are paid $800 per article. There are no ads. Until recently, it was available only via iPhones and iPads. Astonishingly, it’s already turning a profit.

Arment walked me through the numbers. He has 25,000 subscribers who pay $1.99 a month. Apple takes a 30 percent cut, leaving Arment about $35,000 a month.

– How To Start A Magazine (And Make A Profit)

The future of journalism is a constant topic on the internet, just today people in my Twitter stream debated writers being compensated with “exposure”. In that context I find it notable that someone without a background in publishing was able to start a new publication that seems to be paying writers well and is already profitable. Of course it could be that The Magazine has only found a nice niche and this won’t scale, but it’s certainly too early to tell and I hope Marco keeps sharing some meaningful numbers in the future.

"The arguments over the value of Apple’s cash are symptomatic of a much bigger issue: the corporate..."

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 01:48:00 +0100

“The arguments over the value of Apple’s cash are symptomatic of a much bigger issue: the corporate world’s cash hoards. According to Factset, they recently hit $1.23 trillion for nonfinancial companies, more than double pre-crisis levels.
The argument this time is about how this cash stockpiling may be hurting the rest of us. Since the crisis, the left has liked to blame corporations for not using these growing cash piles to create jobs, under the assumption that big companies are sitting on this money like children refusing to share their toys.
It’s more complicated than that, and Paul Krugman and Tyler Cowen (and others) are in a bit of a spat over the matter.”

- http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/02/13/counterparties-spending-1-trillion/

By reading these arguments you can learn a lot, but unfortunately – like so often in economics – you won’t get a definitive answer.

"As a consequence, Excel is everywhere you look in the business world—especially in areas where..."

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 11:33:00 +0100

““As a consequence, Excel is everywhere you look in the business world—especially in areas where people are adding up numbers a lot, like marketing, business development, sales, and, yes, finance. For all the talk about end-to-end financial suites like SAP, Oracle, and Peoplesoft, at the end of the day people do financial analysis by extracting data from those back-end systems and shoving it around in Excel spreadsheets.”
“But while Excel the program is reasonably robust, the spreadsheets that people create with Excel are incredibly fragile. There is no way to trace where your data come from, there’s no audit trail (so you can overtype numbers and not know it), and there’s no easy way to test spreadsheets, for starters. The biggest problem is that anyone can create Excel spreadsheets—badly. Because it’s so easy to use, the creation of even important spreadsheets is not restricted to people who understand programming and do it in a methodical, well-documented way.””

- The role of Microsoft Excel in the “London Whale” trading debacle

What I've been reading lately – Robots, Wealth, Inequality, Risk

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:22:16 +0100

I’m reading a lot these days and if I find something insightful, interesting or that contains new-to-me ideas, I usually recommend it on Twitter. However I feel it’s too fleeting of a platform for this. Quote.fm, which was originally intended to solve this problem, unfortunately isn’t seeing much traction and development lately. So I’m going to use Tumblr instead; this blog was in need for some fresh content for way too long anyway.

A lot of what I read these days is in one way or another about how the future might look like. One big, popular theme lately (both in tech as well as economic publications) is the rise of the robots and how automation will impact our economy and social structures, often also discussed as “capital-biased technological change”.

Noah Smith in The Atlantic with a few ideas on how to deal with the shift from labor to capital:

The big question is: What do we do if and when our old mechanisms for coping with inequality break down? If the “endowment of human capital” with which people are born gets less and less valuable, we’ll get closer and closer to that Econ 101 example of a world in which the capital owners get everything. A society with cheap robot labor would be an incredibly prosperous one, but we will need to find some way for the vast majority of human beings to share in that prosperity, or we risk the kinds of dystopian outcomes that now exist only in science fiction.

How do we fairly distribute income and wealth in the age of the robots?

— The End of Labor: How to Protect Workers From the Rise of Robots

Kevin Kelly in Wired, what jobs humans will do in the future:

“Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.”

“Each successful bit of automation generates new occupations—occupations we would not have fantasized about without the prompting of the automation.”

“The one thing humans can do that robots can’t […] is to decide what it is that humans want to do.”

— Better Than Human: Why Robots Will — And Must — Take Our Jobs

Izabella Kaminska has a great list of articles about the automation and the impact on our economic structures – The Tech Debate Blasts Off (A Linkfest)

Steve Randy Waldman writes about Trade-offs between inequality, productivity, and employment, which is full of thought provoking ideas.

Izabella Kaminska also has series on FT Alphaville called “Beyond Scarcity” that is about scarcity and increasing abundance (accelerated by robots) shaping our economy.

No longer robot related, but still fitting in the theme of (technological) change, wealth/inequality and how the future might look like: Steve Randy Waldman again, on Jonathan Levy’s “Freaks of Fortune” and the history of risk:

There’s a running refrain on Battlestar Galactica: “All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.” One of the delights of Freaks of Fortune is to learn just how true that has been of finance:

Private mortgage-backed securities, with their slicing-dicing reassignment of loans to unidentifiable groups of investors, are often described as novelties. In fact, Levy points out, “mortgage debentures” that bundled, tranched, and resold mortgage cash flows were a staple of the 1880s. They were justified on the same theories of diversification that would be dolled up with math and trotted out again a century later. Mortgage lenders of the Gilded Age bore no resemblance at all to the George Bailey–style local banker. New York financial firms held western mortgages acquired through brokers. To borrowers, a mortgage was a faceless master.

So, all this has happened before, and it will happen again. Must it always? Is there no way out? Levy describes four countermovements to financialized risk: the slave South, “fraternalism,” welfare corporatism, and the welfare state.

— The Risk Ownership Society

To close things off, a long interview with VC Marc Andreessen on future enterprise companies, current consumerized enterprise startups and some general remarks about tech and public market cycles – Marc Andreessen On The Future Of Enterprise

Putting this little post together was more work than I had expected, I think I’ll try single quote+link posts in the future.

Finder toolbar icons and buttons for Mountain Lion

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 23:05:00 +0200

I’ve written before about custom buttons in my Finder’s toolbar. I currently have two icons there, one to create an empty text file in the current folder and another one to open a Terminal window for the current folder.

For Snow Leopard I had created two icons that looked almost exactly like the native Finder toolbar buttons. However once I upgraded to Mountain Lion recently both of them looked extremely ugly and out of place.

So I set out to create new icons which turned out to be a bit harder than I had expected. Through some try-and-error I figured out that icons get scaled down vertically in the ML Finder toolbar, which means that you can’t simply create a pixel-perfect icon and display it.

The workaround I arrived at is to make a graphic that is essentially a copy of a native Finder button, scale it up to 30px with one row of transparent pixels at the top and bottom, export it as an icon and then have the Finder toolbar scale it down again to 23px. With all that scaling going on it would be almost impossible to create a pixel-perfect button, but I managed to create something that looks good enough:

As you can see I also updated the symbols in the buttons since I couldn’t figure out how to make buttons that are more than 23px wide (and those simple graphics work better when being scaled down).

You can download an empty png icon here or the empty button app (with the Terminal icon) here.

As explained in my previous post you can’t simply drag&drop the png file into an icns file and use it for you application. Unfortunately IconDroplet doesn’t seem to work on Mountain Lion anymore, but you can use the empty button app, find the applet.icns file in its Resources folder and edit it with Icon Composer. Then close and reopen the Finder window and the icon of the app should refresh just fine.

I had googled for this stuff previous to making my own icon but couldn’t find anything, so I hope this post saves someone else the time I spent making that little button.

Apple iPhoto maps use OpenStreetMap and public domain data

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 02:17:00 +0100

Apple released iPhoto for iOS today and included a new map. The new map tiles carry no attribution.

The map tiles can be viewed here, site made by Dair Grant.

Based on various Twitter conversations and my own comparisons it seems like Apple is using OpenStreetMap data to render the map tiles outside the US. The map tiles for the US seem to be based on different, probably public domain data sets.

In the example below you see a forest with lots of small ways. I’ve mapped those ways myself, some are so small I’m not sure they are even official ways and a very unlikely to be found in other map data sets. Apple’s map and the OpenStreetMap map align perfectly. Other areas I’ve checked include semi-public parks mapped in very high detail which is typical for OpenStreetMap data but not to be found in other map data sets.

You can compare Apple’s map and the standard OpenStreetMap.org map using this site by Iván Sánchez Ortega.

It looks like the OpenStreetMap data used by Apple is as old as 2010, which means changes made to OpenStreetMap after that date are not included.

Update: Here’s a thread on OSM-talk (public OpenStreetMap mailing list) with more comparisons and confirmations. The data that Apple is using seems to be from April 2010. The Next Web also has updates to their story.

Update II: iPhoto 11 for OS X has been using Apple maps in the slideshow features since 2010, @holgr confirms. This could explain why Apple is using OSM data from 2010.

Why you can't say that OpenStreetMap looks worse than Google Maps

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 23:24:00 +0100

Here’s an attempt to explain why you can’t say that OpenStreetMap looks worse than Google Maps.

A typical map consists of a stack of roughly 5 components:

map data collectors/contributors (people or organizations that survey the world or collect map data from institutions which did that before)
map data (this is raw data, think text and numbers)
renderer (software that turns raw data into beautiful images, like a web browser turning HTML into a website)
rendering style (it’s like CSS and determines the colors of streets, which streets to actually show etc.)
tiles (the colorful pictures you actually see on the website)

Google Maps combines all of them. Google collects the map data, Google owns or licenses the map data, Google builds and operates the renderer, Google’s cartographers and designers define the rendering style and Google owns the map tiles that you see. (You can customize the rendering style to a certain degree, like change street colors, using the Google Maps API.)

OpenStreetMap only consist of the first two components: the OpenStreetMap community collects map data and map data is then made available under an open license.

The third component, the renderer, is NOT part of OpenStreetMap. Let’s use Foursquare, which recently switched to maps based on OpenStreetMap data, as an example here. They use a service called MapBox, which uses a software called TileMill which is based on Mapnik (a very popular open source renderer).

The fourth component, the rendering style is usually made by the person who operates the renderer. The rendering style for the maps that Foursquare is using is made by MapBox, it’s called MapBox Streets and MapBox allows it’s customers to further customize the style for their needs.

The fifth component, the final tiles are owned by whoever renders them, in our example by MapBox.

Now, if you want to compare maps and tell your readers which one looks better or is better cartographically, here’s how to do it.
The shortest version using the examples from above would be: “Google Maps looks better than MapBox Streets.”
If you want to be more precise, write: “The Google Maps standard map style looks better than the MapBox Streets style which is based on OpenStreetMap data.”

Please don’t ever say “Google Maps looks better than OpenStreetMap” because it’s wrong and people from the OpenStreetMap community will get very angry with you (and write blogposts about it).

Here are some quick podcast recommendations. I posted something similar in 2010 (wow, seems like a...

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 23:09:00 +0100

Here are some quick podcast recommendations. I posted something similar in 2010 (wow, seems like a long time ago).

I love the concept of the NPR Planet Money podcast, the length and depth is very nice to quickly get an overview of a topic and you don’t have to have a deeper understanding of economics to listen.

Other podcasts I also recently discovered and enjoy right now are The Critical Path with Horace Dediu (Asymco), The Sounds in My Head, a great music podcast and the B&B podcast with Ben Brooks and Shawn Blanc (I like it for the parts when they don’t talk about the latest iOS update but more general about technology and life).

CRE 190 (German): Viele Tipps, Tricks und Hintergründe zu Rhetorik und Reden. Ein bisschen lang und langsam für meinen Geschmack, aber dennoch sehr lehrreich und hörenswert.

CRE 191 (German): Die ersten 45min kann man meiner Meinung nach getrost überspringen, danach allerdings erfährt man eine Menge über Internetverbindungen via Festnetz in Deutschland (ISDN, DSL). Am interessantesten und mit einigem Kopfschütteln verbunden sind dabei sicherlich die unausgeschöpften technischen Möglichkeiten (100mbit VDSL) und Methoden der Telekom.

Chrome Extension for Redirecting URLs/Domains I was annoyed that...

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 00:49:00 +0100

Chrome Extension for Redirecting URLs/Domains

I was annoyed that I repeatedly entered the wrong domain into Chrome’s omnibox when I wanted to visit openstreetmap.de. So I searched for a workaround and it turned out the easiest way to redirect a domain permanently to another domain is a redirect in your browser.

Google was helpful as always and I found this raw extension. It’s probably one of the simpliest Chrome extensions possible, consisting of three files with basic HTML, JSON and Javascript.

To make it work for me I only had to motify content.js like this:

var osmde = /osm.de/

var newurl

if (window.location.href.match(osmde)) // redirect from osm.de to openstreetmap.de

{

newurl = window.location.href.replace(osmde,“openstreetmap.de”);

}

chrome.extension.sendRequest({redirect: newurl}); // send message to redirect

So if the URL matches osm.de, it will redirect to openstreetmap.de.

You can either copy&paste the 2 files from the aforementioned link and my content.js above or download the whole thing as a .zip here.

The installation is simple, open the Extension tab and activate the developer mode. Click on “Load unpacked extension” and select the folder with the 3 files.

If someone repackages this whole thing into a full Chrome extension with a simple interface for adding redirects, let me know.

28c3 Talks

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:16:00 +0100

Here is a list of talks I watched, enjoyed and can recommend to you. I would love to get recommendations for other great talks I might have missed (send me an @reply on Twitter for example).

Bitcoin - An Analysis: Very interesting analysis of Bitcoin, potential issues and an assessment of its future.
How governments have tried to block Tor: Tor is such an awesome project. The two speakers explain what tactics governments around the world use to try to block Tor (and generally censor the internet) and how Tor reacts. Great talk.
KinectFusion: Seeing this technology is still quite impressive, it was nice to learn how some things work behind the scenes of 3D reconstruction.
7 years, 400+ podcasts, and a whole lot of Frequent Flyer Miles: Bicyclemark provides an overview about what he is doing with his podcast, related travelling and teaching new media around the world. He’s pretty good at telling stories.

German talks:

Der Staatstrojaner (Panel): Die Beteiligten erzählen die Geschichte des Staatstrojaners in 2011.
CCC Jahresrückblick: Ein Klassiker.
Can trains be hacked?: Der Vortrag gibt eine sehr gute Übersicht für Einsteiger über die Eisenbahnsicherungsanlagen (Weichen, Signalsteuerung…) in Deutschland von Beginn der Bahn bis heute. Die potentiellen Sicherheitslücken werden dabei automatisch sichtbar.
Antiforensik: IT-Forensik spielt eine immer wichtiger Rolle und damit natürlich auch Wege die verwendeten Methoden und Software anzugreifen oder zu manipulieren.
Datenvieh oder Daten-Fee: Jeder, der sich nur ein klein bisschen für Datenschutz, Privacy und Tracking im Netz interessiert, sollte sich das auf jeden Fall ansehen, um besser zu verstehen, welche Daten wie erfasst und vor allem genutzt werden.
Frag den Staat: Ein tolles Projekt zur Informationsfreiheit (Open Data!), leider etwas schnell und aufgeregt vorgetragen.

Other talks I’ve watched: NOC review, Fnord-Jahresrückblick, Security Nightmares

Talks can be found on YouTube or downloadable here. List of all talks.

Finder Toolbar Icons and Buttons

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 17:09:00 +0100

I usually organize my files in project folders and often create a file called notes.txt to add some ideas, to-dos or meta data for the project. This used to require several clicks and commands, so I was looking for a faster way to do that.

A quick Google search later I found this great AppleScript app by Jonas Wisser. After you press the button, it’ll ask you for a filename, create filename.txt and open the file in your default text editor.

Since I only want to create a file called notes.txt, I quickly edited the Apple Script app to skip the custom filename part, making the whole process even faster. Luckily the AppleScript app even recognizes existing files and instead of overwriting them simply opens them up.

I now had a almost perfect solution, except for the lack of an icon. The AppleScript logo just looked ugly and non-descriptive in my Finder toolbar.

I’m going to spare you a repetition of all the mistakes and things I had to try to make this work and only describe how you can assign a custom icon to an AppleScript app on Mac OS X (Snow Leopard in my case).

First you have to create your logo; for the Finder toolbar you go with a 32x32 image. Here’s an empty button that you can use. Once you’ve added some custom pixels for your icon, export it as a PNG file.

Next you’ll need Icon Composer, that is part of the Apple Dev tools (XCode). You need to create a new icns file and drag and drop your PNG button in all 5 areas. Then save this icns file.

Unfortunately you can’t use this icns file just yet, because it’s intended to be compiled with a complete app through XCode.

To get around this we use IconDroplet by Zach Weigand. Start IconDroplet and drag your icns file onto the icon in the dock. This will create a new file that doesn’t have a filetype extension since it’s actually an app (be warned, the app will have a date in February 2009 as its creation date, so it might be somewhere way down in your Finder window).

Now you select this app (here’s mine with my NewTextFileHere icon) and press CMD+I. In the Info window you select the icon in the top left and copy it. Then you do Get Info on your target AppleScript app, select the icon in the top left and simply paste the icon.

Drag the app into your Finder toolbar and you should be done.