McKinley 1.0: A $60 SF Symbols Editor Worth Studying

McKinley 1.0 is a new SF Symbols editor for the Mac, and it solves a problem every iOS developer eventually hits: Apple's own SF Symbols app is a viewer and annotator, not a drawing tool. Until now, making a custom symbol meant bouncing between Figma or Illustrator, an SVG export, and Apple's template, hoping nothing broke across weights.

The item reached me through John Gruber's Daring Fireball feed. Every fact below comes from the product page at mckinleysymbols.com. The opinions are mine.

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🔍 What McKinley actually does

The pitch is "all-in-one studio for drawing and annotating SF Symbols." In practice, the page lists these capabilities:

• A real vector editor: Bézier curves, boolean operations, path editing, alignment.
• Same objects, three weights: edit one set of shapes across Ultralight through Black so they stay point-compatible and animate like Apple's own symbols.
• Strokes stay strokes: no more outlining paths before export. Stroke width can vary per weight.
• Colours per object: no layer gymnastics in the SF Symbols app just to assign a colour.
• Live preview using Apple's renderer, including animation preview and Magic Replace between variants. The developer says this uses no private APIs.
• Sync to Asset Catalog: link an Xcode asset catalog, hit a shortcut, and the symbol updates in your project.
• Import: SVG, existing SF Symbols, plus a browser for Material Symbols, Phosphor and Iconify as starting points.
• Export: SF Symbols, Android VectorDrawable, plain SVG.
• AppleScript: full scripting dictionary, with a bundled script that batch-converts SVGs to symbols.

Key takeaway: The real product is not the drawing tools. It is the weight-interpolation model. Draw once, get Ultralight to Black, and Apple's renderer confirms it looks right before you ship.

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💰 Pricing, and what it means in rupees

McKinley is a one-time purchase. No subscription. The page states version 1 buyers get all 1.x updates free, and a discounted upgrade if a version 2 ever appears.

Item	Detail (from mckinleysymbols.com)
Regular price	$60 plus tax (£55 / €65 in those regions)
Launch offer	15% off for the first week, $51
Offer ends	Monday 14 September, midday BST
Trial	14 days, fully functional including save and export
After trial	Save and export disabled
Licence	Perpetual, includes all 1.x updates

Before buying, check today's rate on the LKR exchange rate tool and add your bank's foreign-card margin. Sri Lankan cards charge a few percent on top of the mid-market rate, so the real cost is higher than the sticker.

Is that reasonable? For a freelancer billing an iOS client in USD, one custom icon set at agency rates pays for it many times over. For a student, it is a real cost. That is what the 14-day trial is for: you can finish an entire project's icon set inside the trial window, exports included.

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🛠️ Why this matters if you build iOS apps from Sri Lanka

Most Sri Lankan iOS work I see is contract work for overseas clients, or small local apps built by two or three people. Both cases share a constraint: nobody on the team is a full-time icon designer. The developer draws the icons.

That is exactly where the old workflow hurts:

1. Draw the icon in Figma or Inkscape.
2. Export SVG.
3. Paste it into Apple's SF Symbols template, one weight at a time.
4. Discover that the Regular and Bold weights don't line up, so the symbol jitters when animated.
5. Repeat.

McKinley's answer is to keep one set of geometry linked across weights, with an onion-skin overlay so you see the other weights while editing. You can unlink specific parts when a weight needs its own treatment. The site is honest that automatic interpolation "does not work in every situation," but says it never fails silently. That honesty is worth noting. A tool that tells you when it gave up is far more useful than one that produces a broken symbol quietly.

Bottom line for small teams: if you ship three or more custom symbols per app, the time saved on weight matching alone justifies the trial. If you ship one, Apple's free template is still fine.

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🌐 Cross-platform export is the quiet win

Sri Lankan shops rarely build for iOS alone. The client wants Android too, and the icon set has to match. The product page says McKinley exports to Android VectorDrawable and plain SVG alongside SF Symbols.

Target	Format from McKinley	Notes
iOS / macOS	SF Symbol, synced to asset catalog	Three weights, variants, badges
Android	VectorDrawable	Single weight, from the same source document
Web	SVG	For your landing page or PWA

One source document feeding three platforms is the part I would test first. If it holds up, it removes a whole class of "the Android icon looks different" bug reports. For quick one-off web conversions you don't need a paid app at all; a free in-browser image format converter handles the raster side, and SVG is text you can edit by hand.

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⚡ The engineering lesson: documentation as a product signal

The Daring Fireball post makes a point I agree with: good products with bad docs exist, but poor products with great docs are rare. McKinley ships a complete offline user guide, Quick Look previews for its documents, and a Limitations page that names what it can't do:

• No support for the Draw On / Draw Off effects added in SF Symbols 7.
• Artwork can't differ between the three sizes; it only scales.
• Interpolation can fail on complex shapes, but with a notification.

Compare that with the average indie tool page that lists only features. Publishing your limitations is a trust move. It also cuts support load, because users self-select before they buy.

If you are building your own tools, paid or free, this is the pattern to copy:

Practice	What McKinley did	Cheap way to do it yourself
Offline manual	Full guide inside Help	A docs/ folder rendered as static pages
Limitations page	Named unsupported features	One markdown section, updated per release
Scripting hooks	AppleScript dictionary + sample scripts	A CLI flag or JSON API on your tool
Honest failure	Interpolation warns, never silent	Surface errors in the UI, log them

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💡 What this means for you

• Student with a Mac and an iOS project: install the 14-day trial, build your whole icon set inside it, export, done. Cost: zero.
• Freelancer billing in USD: $60 is a business expense that pays back on the first custom icon set. Buy before the launch discount ends on 14 September if you're going to buy at all.
• Small team shipping iOS and Android: the single-source export to VectorDrawable and SVG is the feature to evaluate, not the drawing tools.
• No Mac: McKinley is Mac-only. Keep using Inkscape plus Apple's template, or ask a teammate with a Mac to run the AppleScript batch converter on your SVGs.
• Tool builder: copy the documentation and limitations pattern. It costs nothing and separates serious software from the rest.

I have not bought it myself yet. If I do, I'll post a follow-up on how the SVG import handles icons drawn in Inkscape, since that is the workflow most people here actually use.