Application Icons in Mac classic

[Mark Brownell]

On Saturday, May 29, 2004, at 02:47  AM, Graham Samuel wrote:

> I haven't been following this conversation, but does this mean that I 
> can't offer an installation process to a user of Classic mode without 
> telling the user to rebuild the desktop? Can I appleScript it so as to 
> avoid getting the user to do this step (I still know nothing about AS, 
> to my shame)?
>
> TIA
>
> Graham

Graham,

  Standalone apps need a little tweaking before being packaged for 
distribution. ResEdit allows me to change the existing icon for my 
freshly built standalone apps to the ones I want the user to see. So if 
your users have an existing standalone app of yours with an older icon 
or improper icon I would think that they would have to rebuild the 
desktop after removing your old app and installing your new one.

If on the other hand they are installing your app for the first time 
then it should work fine. At least that's the way I see it working. 
Unfortunately I'm working in a vacuum here and hove not seen a new 
first time install of my app on another Mac Classic box.

You can test this for me if you want to. I just put up the Mac Classic 
version of the MTML browser, "Intuition." It might have some user 
privileges issues I need to debug but if you create a new file after 
running it for the first time it should allow you to see a file with 
the proper icons. The download file contains the app and two files. I'm 
debugging an issue I discovered involving MTML and image encapsulation 
that currently kicks out some DRM in the display. This should be fixed 
in a few days. I discovered that if you don't save images internally 
they don't travel with your packaged app if you originally linked to 
them externally. So anyone that downloaded my Intuition app a few 
months ago never saw the blue dot in the text field view window when 
highlighting and adding MTML references or HTML changes.

If you want to see if the icons travel well on first installs on Mac 
Classic then go to this page and download the Mac Classic version on 
your (<= Mac 9.1) computer.

http://www.gizmotron.org/intuition/download.html

It would be comforting to know if these changed icons actually work as 
intended. There should be a red square icon with a blue dot, an "X" and 
"MTML" in the middle.

Mark