Live data from Hacker News

Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

weblog.antranigv.am

101–110 of 130 posts

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#101
post #76
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many applications and such have shortcuts that are quite useful but hidden. It can be worth a few minutes crawling through the menus and accessibility settings. The one I like is you can universally change the short cut for paste so that “paste without formatting” is the default CMD-V

That's a very good idea. But do you just create one for "All Applications" called "Paste without formatting"?

Yes though iirc I had to do something special for Office. Not at my computer to check, but office was the most important one.

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#102
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

It doesn’t even have to be an icon. For my digital copies of DVDs, I change the icon to the cover of the DVD by copying the image to the clipboard, doing cmd-I on the file, selecting the icon in the upper left corner and pasting the image in place of the icon. The default view for the folder with all the DVD rips has large icons and black text on a black background to hide the file names (for aesthetics). I miss the old carousel view which would make it feel like flipping through a stack of DVDs to find what I wanted to watch.

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#103
post #79
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop describing something I remember experiencing like yesterday the same way they talk about ox ploughs at a pioneer village museum.

My first program was written in FORTRAN on punch cards, back in those days we tied an onion to our belt—no, we didn’t do that, and I was just a kid, so Truthfully what I observed was that in those days mainframes had a “machine room” where the cabinets were cooled with air conditioning popes that ran under the raised floor. The engineers had those suction cup handles glaziers use to carry panes of glass, they were us…

Ah, I remember the old machine room days. (and I love the typo of air-conditioned popes). A few years ago, my department had a field trip to the Blue Cross/Blue Shield data center in Waukegan for a tour. So unlike the machine rooms of yore, although they did have an IBM big metal machine up there alongside all the rack-mounted servers (and even that was tiny compared to the old IBM mainframe I used to work with at UIC back in the 80s).

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#104
post #56
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop describing something I remember experiencing like yesterday the same way they talk about ox ploughs at a pioneer village museum.

Now, we’re didn’t have Bluetooth back then like you do today, so we used to plug our headphones in through that little hole you see on the side of every computer. I bet you've always wondered what that hole was for! We used to have them on our phones, too, only back then they didn't have wifi and we called them iPods...

I had a Bluetooth headset for my Palm Treo 650 actually. But I think I still had to sync it via USB.

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#105
post #43
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…

Unless you have a Pioneer drive and macOS 13.2

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-13-2-breaks-compa...

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#106
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

I used to make my Gentoo installs as close as I could get to grayscale, for everything except content. Looked awesome, but like all other fiddly customizations, I basically gave it up after a while. Too much effort for too little reward.

[EDIT] Uh, the connection being that I would also collect grayscale icon sets, since sometimes the best results came from mix-and-matching those, as some might lack good icons (or any at all) for some programs.

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#107
post #102
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

It doesn’t even have to be an icon. For my digital copies of DVDs, I change the icon to the cover of the DVD by copying the image to the clipboard, doing cmd-I on the file, selecting the icon in the upper left corner and pasting the image in place of the icon. The default view for the folder with all the DVD rips has large icons and black text on a black background to hide the file names (for aesthetics). I miss the…

I don't remember their names, but there used to be apps that would take a raw cover image and place it in a nicely rendered CD/DVD cover template to produce a pseudophotorealistic cover icon which you could then paste on rips.

The Mac customization scene used to be a pretty vibrant place… you can still see traces of it but it's dwindled over the years.

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#108
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

If folks are not aware you can also use Get Info (Command + I) then drag a new icon onto the existing icon for any drive or folder. This is how I set custom icons for different partitions (I have show drives on desktop enabled).

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#109
post #33
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

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.

Similarly, there used to be a haxie[0] that could hook Carbon apps and make it so if there were any progress bars in a window, once the progress bar reached 100% progress the "water" in it would begin to overflow and fill the window. Completely pointless but fun.

[0]: A formalized way to distribute code injection hacks for the purpose of user customization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsanity

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#110
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

Folder, yes. Drive, unfortunately not[1]. One of those odd things which is theoretically for security, but practically annoying.

1: https://www.macworld.com/article/609302/want-to-change-a-mac...

Post reply on HN