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Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

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Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#81

Post by giantrobot »

grishka wrote: post #43
Aeolun wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess a mac only application for disk burning becomes a bit pointless when there’s no macs with disc drives any more.

Not entirely pointless. You can connect an external optical drive even to most modern of macs and it'll work. That contraption consisting of a full-size DVD drive and a SATA-USB adapter with external power, plugged into a USB-A/USB-C adapter and then my M1 macbook, for that one time when I was given a CD and was curious to see what's on it? It worked flawlessly. Though I've never tried burning discs on macOS, I don't…

Burning discs, even from an M1 Mac, works just fine. I burned a CD just the other day.

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#82

Post by eddieroger »

rahoulb wrote: post #22
bartvk wrote: post #19

That burnable folder icon is pretty fun. If you drag it to the Finder sidebar, it has a special icon too. I opened terminal, and did "mkdir Test.fpbf", then in Finder, navigated to the home directory and dragged that folder to the left sidebar. It shows up with a "nuke" icon to the left, and a grey nuke icon to the right. I may leave it there, to have something fun to talk about when sharing a screen over Teams with…

It may be hard to believe now, but there was a time when iTunes was a great piece of software. It used to have two jobs - play your music and manage your music - and it had a good UI for both tasks. iTunes had a "brushed metal" interface - the Apple HIG said brushed metal was for apps that represent "devices", as opposed to standard "Aqua" (or "Platinum" if you go back far enough) for apps which represent "documents"…

> Burning a CD was an expensive operation (both in time and compute, as it slowed the machine down, plus it tied up your CD drive)

Discs were also decently expensive then as well, so financially expensive too. Not prohibitively so, but not like today where a failed disc is just a coaster not a headache. This may have been near the cusp of when that balance shifted, but I remember quite a bit of angst when I was a young'in burning mix discs for my Discman.

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#83

Post by eddieroger »

mattl wrote: post #54
threeseed wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears to be a relic from the NeXT days. If you look at the video [1] you can see it installing developer tools into the NeXTDeveloper and NeXTLibrary folders. So it's quite possible Apple just did a find/replace and removed the prefix. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMh0WsLZZVY

Earlier versions of Mac OS X would install the development tools in /Developer on the hard drive too.

Right - it was more like Utilities than Documents. A folder for a type of app that not every user needed, not for documented created for a purpose.

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#84

Post by giantrobot »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #68
yakkers wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been in macOS for quite some time. Mostly dormant now but at one point it was what powered the Web Sharing option in the Sharing prefpane. It was also used in OS X Server (both the OS X versions designed for Xserve and the later "app" version) before that was largely whittled away. I can't exactly find if it came with OS X since the beginning (which would predate nginx and friends), but it probably was a much mo…

I feel like it dates from earlier internet, before the age of walled garden takeover, when it still seemed like a decentralized internet would be the thing, and everyone would be, like, using a desktop GUI to create html or something. Of course everyone should have a webserver on their machine, right? Apple was ahead of the curve on something that never arrived and many of us still miss.

The web sharing was more about sharing on local networks. It was the same concept as the Public folder for file sharing which dates back to NeXT. When Bonjour née Rendezvous was released Apple build an Apache module for it. When web sharing was enabled it would advertise the server over Bonjour. Safari still supports Bonjour server discovery IIRC.

The Apache install would obviously work over the Internet but sharing over the local network was its main purpose.

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#85

Post by jayrhynas »

st3fan wrote: post #70

Wait until they find out you can simply paste a new icon on any folder! Some great old skool ones at https://freeware.iconfactory.com/icons Just look at those .. so good .. https://i.imgur.com/0fMNFFX.png

I used to "collect" icon sets, even though I only ever used about 1% of them

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#86

Post by shaunsingh0207 »

rahoulb wrote: post #48
unfunco wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to use Disco, the website is still alive: https://discoapp.com When a CD was burning, smoke would emanate from the app, and if you blew on your microphone the smoke would disperse.

Blowing the smoke away is a great touch. I miss that kind of thing - the closest we get nowadays is when things bounce or shake a little bit as you interact with them. I guess this is what Gruber was talking about recently - stuff that wouldn't go on a spreadsheet of features but make you want to use the app just because it does stuff like this.

Another similar example, blowing into the microphone would spin the title name around on 3ds games (and poking/blowing at random things in game would sometimes do fun stuff too!)

Those tiny details and fun little things here and there are what people remember in 10-20 years. I wish developers did them more

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#87

Post by shaunsingh0207 »

hbn wrote: post #80
donatj wrote: post #71

“Developer” wasn’t intended for your code but rather as a Developer specific Applications folder. IDEs and debug tools and what have you. Xcode in earlier versions of Mac OS X installed to Developer

Is there anything that still automatically installs itself there? If it's not used for that anymore, might as well use it for code.

/System/Developer still exists, though it doesn't contain anything

/Library/Developer is where Xcode's Command-line tools install too, your apple sdk's, along with a copy of clang, swift, and git

Neither of them seem to have cool icons though

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#88

Post by frankus »

hbn wrote: post #80
donatj wrote: post #71

“Developer” wasn’t intended for your code but rather as a Developer specific Applications folder. IDEs and debug tools and what have you. Xcode in earlier versions of Mac OS X installed to Developer

Is there anything that still automatically installs itself there? If it's not used for that anymore, might as well use it for code.

Counterpoint is that it requires the shift key, is relatively long (compared to, say, src) and shares the “De” prefix with Desktop.

That said, it’s what I use.

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#89

Post by throwntoday »

I noticed this when I reinstalled macOS. At some point they stopped including a ~/Sites folder but if you create one now it will give you the special Sites folder icon in the main Finder window. Oddly though they did not update the small version of the icon so it shows up in the sidebar as a regular folder.
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