Dock icon - data update

[J. Landman Gay]

Karen wrote:
> 
> On 20 Feb 2006, at 01:07, Jacqueline Landman Gay wrote:
> 
>> Yes, you should be able to do it. Revolution has a global property
>> called the "icon" which, if set, specifies the icon that is  displayed in
>> the OS X dock. You could write a script that takes a snapshot of a  small
>> image containing the text you want to show, and then set the icon  to the
>> id of that image. If you do this repeatedly using a "send in <time>"
>> structure, the icon would update dynamically.
> 
> 
> Thanks very much for the answer Jacque.  I'm guessing that I would  also 
> need to be able to combine the graphic of my existing icon with  the 
> snapshot of the text that I wanted to show.  I'll need to try any  
> figure out how to do that now - I've not done much with graphics in  Rev 
> previously.

Right, you'll need to overlay the text onto an existing copy of your 
icon. However, that text is going to be awfully small; I wonder how 
useful it will be.

There used to be another problem as well -- the Finder did not update 
the dock icon automatically. Even though you have changed it, the Finder 
ignores the change  until the next time it updates its display. I 
imagine there is some kind of shell command that can force Finder to 
update -- or maybe that's changed in later versions of OS X. I haven't 
tried the technique in a very long time, so a lot of my info is 
theoretical only. You'll have to do some experiementing, I"m afraid.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com