Flash Pixel

Draw pixel art — then open, edit and save classic icon formats like .ico, .icl and .icns, right on your Mac and iPad. Free, no ads, no account.

Flash Pixel is a native pixel-art editor for Mac and iPad with a specialty: it reads and writes the classic icon formats of the Windows and Mac past.

■ A pixel art editor

• Nine tools: pen, eraser, fill, eyedropper, line, rectangle, ellipse, rectangular select and lasso
• Layers with visibility, opacity and reordering
• Animation: arrange frames on a timeline and export as GIF
• Grid overlay (three line widths), checkerboard or solid background, transparent color
• Smooth zooming with pinch and shortcuts

■ Palettes

• Eleven built-in palettes: Crayons 48 (default), PICO-8, Game Boy-style, NES/Famicom, Mac 16/256, Windows 16/256, web-safe 216, 16 grays, black & white
• Custom palettes, with GIMP (.gpl) and JASC (.pal) import and export
• An "in use" palette that lists just the colors in your artwork

■ Classic icon formats

• .ico (Windows icons): read and write, preserving resolutions and bit depths
• .icl (Windows 3.x icon libraries): not just reading — Flash Pixel writes them too, keeping icon names and groups
• .icns including old-generation variants, .cur with hotspot display, .ani
• Icon extraction from .dll / .exe, and Classic Mac resource forks (Mac only)
• Plus PNG, GIF, BMP, WebP, XPM, Xcursor and APNG

■ Multi-resolution documents

• Keep dedicated canvases for 16, 32, 48, 256 px and more in a single document
• Exports prefer the dedicated canvas for each size, so small sizes stay hand-tuned

■ At home on Mac and iPad

• A document-based native app with QuickLook previews and iCloud Drive support
• On iPad, draw with Apple Pencil, pan and zoom with your fingers, double-tap to swap pen and eraser, squeeze to switch tools

■ Respectful by design

• Free. No ads, no account, no data collection
• Documents live on your device or in your own iCloud Drive