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- Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
- Path: sparky!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!csc.ti.com!tilde.csc.ti.com!fstop.csc.ti.com!usenet
- From: Michael Babin
- Subject: Finder changes alias icon
- Message-ID: <1992Jul30.201915.616@csc.ti.com>
- Sender: usenet@csc.ti.com
- Nntp-Posting-Host: babin
- Organization: Texas Instruments
- Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 20:19:15 GMT
- Lines: 53
-
-
- Thought I'd share an interesting piece of Finder behavior that I encountered
- the other day.
-
- First, I have a disk (call it "System") which is mounted and appears on my
- desktop. It's shown using its "default" B&W icon. I select System and choose
- "Make Alias" from the File menu. "System alias" now appears on my desktop with
- the same default B&W icon as System. So far, so good.
-
- Now I assign a custom icon to "System alias". In this case, it's the colorful
- icon from Spaceward Ho! (a great game from Peter Commons & Delta Tao, btw).
- I then select "System alias" and choose "Make Alias" from the File menu.
- "System alias alias" now appears on my desktop with the colorful SH icon.
- Again, so far, so good.
-
- Here's the strange part. If I now double-click on "System alias alias", which
- opens the disk System, the colorful icon for my "alias alias" is altered. In
- this particular case, it becomes the outline of the B&W icon through which I
- can see the clipped portion of my colorful SH icon!
-
- OK, that's the simple, anyone can reproduce description of the problem. At a
- more detailed level, it appears that the Finder is copying the icon information
- from the disk (the driver in this case) to the alias file using the resource ID
- of the "secondary custom icon", -16496. The "secondary custom icon" ID was
- already
- used, thank you very much, by the Finder for the SH icon when it created the
- "alias alias". Thus, the information gets overridden. In this particular case,
-
- you end up with a mismatched icon family since the icon information for the
- disk
- is not as complete as that of the SH icon (missing members of the family, icl8,
-
- icl4, etc.). If the original (the System disk, in this case) had a complete
- icon
- family, the icon for the "alias alias" would be changed to match that of the
- original.
-
- I strongly suspect that this is a bug. Why would you want to change the icon
- of an
- alias to match that of the original? If you did want them to match, why not
- just
- assign the correct icon when the alias is created? If this behavior is
- considered
- a "feature", could anyone explain why?
-
- On a related note, what is the best way to bring a problem you've encountered
- to the
- attention of the proper person at Apple who can fix or explain it?
-
- Later,
-
- Mike Babin
- babin@ra.csc.ti.com
-