Fix Icons is an experimental utility to fix some small, irritating problems that can sometimes happen with the desktop database. Sometimes an application may lose its icons. Or the icons may look OK, but you cannot drag and drop documents on top of the application that you know you should be able to. Or you might get a new version of the application, which has some new icons, but the Finder continues to display the old ones.
The usual way to fix these problems is to rebuild the desktop database. However, this is a drastic operation, which can be quite time-consuming on a large hard disk. It causes you to lose any comments you may have entered into “Get Info” windows. And it may cause you to lose other icons.
Fix Icons offers a less upsetting alternative. It lets you open any file which has a suite of icons associated with it: this might be an application, in which case the icons are associated with the types of documents you can double-click to open with that application, but it needn’t be. Fix Icons will refresh the desktop database with the information about the associated icons and document types, without affecting anything else. You may need to quit and restart the Finder in order to see the effect of the change, but this is still better than having to rebuild the desktop database.
If all goes well, you will not see any messages. Sometimes Fix Icons will report certain situations that, while not necessarily bad, are nevertheless things you might like to know about. For example, there might be more than one copy of an application on your disk. Or there might be a “dangling” entry in the desktop database, pointing to a copy of the application that no longer exists.
Note: Fix Icons requires System 7.0 or later. It will only work with volumes that support the Desktop Manager. This includes network volumes, and disks larger than 2MB. It doesn’t include 800K and 1.4MB floppy disks. If you have AppleScript, you will find that Fix Icons is both scriptable and recordable. In fact, there are a few additional, even more experimental functions that you can only get at via AppleScript (open its dictionary to find out what they are).
Like I said above, Fix Icons is an experimental utility. It doesn’t do anything really dangerous, but there is still the chance that it may conflict with some Apple system software extensions that I haven’t tried yet. Use at your own risk. If you hit any problems, let me know.
Lawrence D’Oliveiro
Computer Services Dept
University of Waikato
Hamilton
New Zealand
e-mail: ldo@waikato.ac.nz
1995 July 22
• Development history:
1.0d7 1995 July 22 — Deal with the fact that afpItemNotFound errors, which are documented as being what is returned when you run off the end of a list of Desktop Manager items, are indiscriminately converted to fnfErr errors by AppleShare on shared volumes. Added an AppleScript function to return the “kind” info which is present in the desktop database for certain applications if Easy Open is installed. I now get the list of drag-and-drop types from the application’s “open” resource, if it has one. When getting the drag-and-drop list from FREF resources, I ignore the APPL entry.
1.0d6 1994 December 19 -- Gave up trying to special-case stationery file types when rebuilding drag-and-drop info. Tried to do graceful handling of APPL entries where the file and its containing folder have both been deleted, but it turns out the Desktop Manager won’t let me delete these entries. Corrected Finder update event to update file’s parent folder, not file itself.
1.0d5 1994 September 24 -- Added notification of whether icons actually needed updating or not. Added “trash desktop” function (only accessible via scripting, for now).
1.0d4 1994 March 23 -- Fixed PowerMac incompatibility.
1.0d3 1994 March 8 -- Added “impostor” functions (only accessible via scripting), so that you can double-click a document and have it open in the application of your choice. Added coercion handlers to convert strings to OSTypes and FSSpecs, for more convenient scripting. If you are running the new Scriptable Finder, you shouldn’t need to quit and restart it for changes to take effect: Fix Icons now sends an update AppleEvent to notify the Finder about changes. Of course, this doesn’t work with older Finders.
