Re: Custom document icons
Re: Custom document icons
- Subject: Re: Custom document icons
- From: Uli Kusterer <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 01:44:37 +0200
Am 18.04.2007 um 01:44 schrieb Chris McFarling:
I'm not a Mac programmer but have a couple questions that I think
requires OS X programming knowledge.
???
When an app creates/saves a document, the document can have a
custom icon assigned to it. From what I gather there are a couple
ways to associate the custom icon with the document type. One is
the old fashioned way that utilizes a resource fork and the other
uses newer OS X specific techniques. If a resource fork is not
used, do type/creator codes still need to be present for OS X to
utilize a custom document icon?
For *custom* icons, type/creator codes were never needed. They were
only needed for "regular" icons, i.e. icons defined by an application
for its documents. Since OS X, you can also key off the file name
suffix ("extension") to decide what icon to show for a particular type.
Photoshop (and maybe other graphics apps) is unique in that it can
save a thumbnail representation of the image as the document icon.
This means that every document can have a unique icon. Currently,
even with the latest versions of Photoshop (haven't tried CS3 yet
though) & OS X, a resource fork is still being used to accomplish
this type of custom icon. Is there any other way that this can be
done without using a resource fork, currently or in the future?
Does Adobe plan on using resource forks for the forseeable future?
Will OSX support resource forks for the forseeable future?
So far, Apple has made no indication that resource forks are going
away. They have simply discouraged their use for essential
information, as they might get stripped off e.g. when transferred
across the web. So unless thumbnails are essential in some way, I
don't see why you shouldn't use them. You can always re-generate them
based on the file's contents, after all.
And anyway, they're the only way to get custom icons for files on
the Mac, and they get simulated on non-HFS disks, so are available
pretty reliably. They're simply your only option, whether Apple or
Adobe choose to use them, or not.
Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
http://www.zathras.de
_______________________________________________
Cocoa-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
Do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list.
Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden