Glossary

Appearance Manager The part of Mac OS system software that provides additional user interface elements and options.

Appearance-compliant Software that is written to work with the Appearance Manager.

badge An overlay for an icon. Badges indicate a change of state for an object without a change in type; for example, a folder could be badged to indicate that it contains Applescripts.

deep mask An icon mask with 256 levels of transparency.

desktop A location composed of the startup volume's desktop folder plus the icons of all other mounted volumes.

file object A file, folder or volume.

highlight To make something visually distinct, typically when it's selected. This is generally done by reversing black and white or changing colors to provide a sharp contrast.

icon variants A set of optional transformations for standard icons.

IconRef An opaque value representing a particular set of icon data.

invisible file A file that the Finder will not normally display to the user.

opaque value An object that references a particular type and instance of data. An IconRef is an example of an opaque value.

override The process of temporarily changing the data for an IconRef .

reference counting The process of tracking how many clients are using a particular object (such as an IconRef .)

registered icon An icon whose data is stored in the icon cache and therefore is readily available.

volume A portion of a storage device that is formatted to contain files.