The hand-packed icns was pixel-clean (verified by unpacking and scanning
every size), but macOS 26 composites legacy .icns icons into the Liquid
Glass system at render time; stacked on Icon Composer's baked PNG-export
lighting, that clips the rim highlights into the near-corner specks and
abrupt highlight ends (owner report 2026-10-13). The fix is the real
layered icon: mac.icon now points at the Icon Composer document
(build/icon.icon, copied from ~/Documents/Affinity/lh-logo) and
electron-builder compiles it via actool into Assets.car — macOS 26+
renders the true Liquid Glass design (dark/tinted variants included).
actool's backwards-compat icns caps at 256px, so scripts/after-pack.cjs
swaps in the existing full-res build/icon.icns before signing: pre-Tahoe
macOS keeps today's quality, Tahoe gets the layered icon.
Windows/Linux get the owner's flat design (rounded squircle with baked
transparency): scripts/make-icons.mjs renders build/icon-flat.svg via
resvg into build/icon.ico (16→256 PNG entries) + build/icon.png (512),
and electron-builder.yml pins win.icon/linux.icon.
desktop:dist injects DEVELOPER_DIR (actool needs Xcode; the machine
selects CommandLineTools by default, CI's setup-xcode takes precedence
via the :- default). The release workflow's mac job selects Xcode 26+
explicitly. Verified locally: mac --dir build (Assets.car + checksummed
full-res fallback + CFBundleIconName/IconFile) and the win-unpacked exe
carries our ico bytes; NSIS/AppImage assembly is CI's (cross-build
tooling can't run on arm64 macOS). Runbook updated. 1610/1610.
amosblomqvist