On 22.03.2009, at 17:27, Pierce Freeman wrote:
The problem that I see if that every application's icon
name is different and I haven't found a way to read that
application's icon
location or will just return a NSImage that is the icon.
Sure you can retrieve NSImages for application icons. Look at
NSWorkspace's iconForFile: method and similar ones. Now, changing
them, that's a different matter. This used to be able with Carbon's
Icon Services APIs, though. There you were able to override an icon
with one you provided, e.g. to animate the progress bar on a
downloaded file icon. Might want to look into those. Last time I did
that was on OS 9 though, so no guarantee whether that's still system-
wide these days.
I am wondering if there is some way to change another applications
icon
programmatically.
What are you trying to do that you need to do this? Are you trying
to change the dock icons of running applications, or what? For that,
it might be a better idea to use Accessibility APIs or AppleScript (or
maybe even CGWindow APIs work?) to determine the rectangle of the
requisite dock tile, and then show your own, transparent window on top?
Have you considered the repercussions of your changes on the
developers of the other applications? Consider that, not only would
you break any code signing on those apps, and any other checksums they
may be using to make sure patches or incremental updates work, you
could also trigger other sorts of tamper alerts, or through a bug
damage the application whose icon you wanted to change.
Trouble is, the user might not notice until they next launch that
other app. And the people who would then have to deal with what your
app caused are likely the ones who developed your 'victim' app. After
all, many users won't understand that just changing an icon can damage
an application, not to mention that some might have forgotten they
used your application to change the icon.
We used to get lots of bug reports from people who had used third-
party tools to strip Intel code from their universal binary
applications to save disk space. They'd done that a while ago, and
when they used the migration assistant to move their apps to their new
Intel Mac months later, some of them refused to work, and many of them
were dog-slow because of issues with Rosetta they wouldn't even have
had if they had just run the intel-native code we put in there.
I'm not saying you shouldn't do that, but I just thought I'd make
you aware of the backlash that applications that patch others in
whatever way can cause. Talk to the guys from Unsanity if you want to
know how even people who did a very good job of writing a robust
patching engine got hissed at, I'm sure they have a few stories to
tell...
Oh, one more thing: If you really just want to change the icon, you
may want to look into how Finder applies custom icons to folders.
You'd still have to authenticate, but at least you'd be doing a
modification that the user can do using the Finder, so it's something
application developers can expect. I believe how it's basically done
is creating a file with the name "Icon\r" (\r is 0x0D, i.e. a return
character, not a newline as in \n or 0x0A) at the top level of the
application package, next to the "Contents" folder, and set the
kHasCustomIcon flag on the folder. The "Icon\r"-file contains an
'icns' resource with ID -16455 containing the contents of a .icns file.
Cheers,
-- Uli Kusterer
"The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere..."
http://www.zathras.de
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