Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS
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weblog.antranigv.am
I may leave it there, to have something fun to talk about when sharing a screen over Teams with colleagues.
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" - and in the top-right corner was a recessed "iris". When you put a blank CD into the drive, then clicked the iris with a playlist selected, the iris animated opening, revealing a glowing yellow and black "Burn" button (using this same icon). You clicked the glowing button and your playlist would be burnt to CD.
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), so the "safety cover" iris and the animation revealing the button underneath used to delight me every time I used it.
No hole.
The engineers had those suction cup handles glaziers use to carry panes of glass, they were used to lift floor tiles up to access the cabling and AC running under the floor. Because of the AC, the space under the floor was cold. And that’s where they stored the beer, or a can of root beer for the kid who was hanging around writing simple programs.
I remember that like the day-before-yesterday, but to everyone else it’s as like telling an anecdote about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage commenting on your pull request against the Difference Engine.
When a CD was burning, smoke would emanate from the app, and if you blew on your microphone the smoke would disperse.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-13-2-breaks-compa...
The drives still exist. They're just optional now. Like bucket seats.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD564LL/A/apple-usb-super...
Best optical drive I own. When nothing else will read a crusty disc, the SuperDrive always does.
When a disc won't read or write in my Pioneer drive, I try it in my no-name Blu-ray drive, and when that fails, I try it in the SuperDrive, and it always works.
I consider something that works reliably 99% of the time to be a better value than something that works 80% of the time.
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.
Those tiny details and fun little things here and there are what people remember in 10-20 years. I wish developers did them more
Now, everyone uses Agile-ish, and software is NEVER finished. You always have a backlog. Those are always going to be more important to your PM than an Easter Egg.
[0]: A formalized way to distribute code injection hacks for the purpose of user customization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsanity
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.
Some great old skool ones at https://freeware.iconfactory.com/icons
Just look at those .. so good .. https://i.imgur.com/0fMNFFX.png
vscode’s icon is so bland and boring, it’s also hard to distinguish from other apps cause nowadays lots of apps use blue colored icons.
[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.
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.
1: https://www.macworld.com/article/609302/want-to-change-a-mac...
Iconfactory also updated their icon manager, CandyBar, to work with Apple Silicon. https://blog.iconfactory.com/2022/04/candybar-sugar-free-edi...
Uploads is where I put any temporary files that I've just made, e.g. an attachment I need to email, or upload into an online service of some kind. Previously my desktop became littered with these files which I absolutely hated.
I just wish I could set the sidebar icon to an upwards arrow.
For each icon size: Use the smart lasso to make a circular selection, then rotate left 2 times.
0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/seig87/how_to_make_cus...
IDEs and debug tools and what have you. Xcode in earlier versions of Mac OS X installed to Developer
If it's not used for that anymore, might as well use it for code.
/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
That said, it’s what I use.
Nope. MacOS's filesystem is by default case-insensitive but case-preserving:
cd ~/developer
and cd ~/Developer
should both work if you have a subdirectory called "Developer" in your homedir.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.
Don’t forget to update the folder permissions to be like the others in your home directory. By default all users of your machine will have read access to the ~/Developer folder you create.
And while you’re at it, might as well pin that folder to the left side of Finder.
I usually call that directory just "dev", and use lowercase names for all custom directories so zsh completion actually works.
For a "clean" home directory I started to visible hide default folders I have no interest in:
chflags hidden ~/Music
Still available in the shell or in the Finder with the ⇧⌘. shortcut but out of the way in normal use. Return to normal with the flag nohidden. Although Documents and Desktop seem to be a special case because of the iCloud shenanigans. I seem to have hidden them in the past, but can’t unhide them. :/I sort of do the opposite. I hide any folders I add to the home directory
chflags hidden ~/bin
chflags hidden ~/Applications
chflags hidden ~/sandbox
so that in the unlikely event anyone sees my home directory, there is absolutely nothing interesting about it. "This looks like a clean install. Nothing to see here."I'm a little confused though; I've been using custom folder icons since at least Windows XP, surely you can just set a custom icon on your folders in macOS? I wouldn't want a clunky name like "Developer " in my home directory, "Development" or "Projects" would fit the context much better.
Edit: looks like you can. You need to open an icns file, hit the copy command, open a folder's properties and paste (https://support.apple.com/en-US/guide/mac-help/mchlp2313/mac). Bizarre that there's no UI for this, I would've expected a system icon selection popup at the very least.
Windows method isn't much better, with that miniscule non-resizable horizontally-scrolling icon picker that doesn't scroll with the scroll wheel, so you have to click the scrollbar arrows like a caveman. I like to use the briefcase folder icon for my Projects folder (I think it's located inside C:\Windows\system32\imageres.dll).
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_user_directories
No way to add unique icons for them though:
Oh, I didn't realize that. Seems like a strange choice?
The CUPS software is still available in Ventura and it comes with version 2.3.4. This version is more up-to-date compared to the latest release of CUPS from Apple on Github and it doesn't match any releases in OpenPrinting CUPS.
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 more likely choice back in the day, and I guess that's why it's still included. Wouldn't be surprised to see it quietly disappear from later macOS releases, though.
Apache was one of the installable options alongside Emacs and WebObjects.
Apple was ahead of the curve on something that never arrived and many of us still miss.
The Apache install would obviously work over the Internet but sharing over the local network was its main purpose.
What kind of content do you think they imagined as use cases for local network http server over bonjour? Like for a small business? Or household? Or giving strangers access to something when you happened to be physically adjacent and on the same network?
It still seems like kind of evidence of a decentralized networking environment that never really came to be... bonjour in general kind of is, although it's still there and gets used for some specific things. But we have ended up doing a lot more connections "cloud-mediated" instead of peer-to-peer.
As for the use case, in the classic MacOS days and even early days of OSX the system didn't ship with support for Windows file sharing. It wasn't until IIRC Jaguar (10.2) that Samba shipped default with the system. Web sharing made for a workable lowest common denominator for getting content off a Mac to Windows. With Bonjour (in Safari) you'll see all the shares on the local network segment.
Additionally since web sharing was just Apache it shipped with a bunch of the extension modules. I believe PHP was enabled by default so you could just drop a PHP script in your Sites folder for a dynamic page. CGI was also simple to enable because thanks to all the shipped modules.
Bonjour is decidedly a local peer-to-peer discovery mechanism. Even the packets have a short TTL so they don't route beyond local segments. It's far too chatty to be a WAN discovery system.
We ended up with cloud mediated connections because of NAT and UPnP hole poking sucks. Residential routers are really shitty in general. They also don't make port forwarding easy (or possible). So a host behind a NAT router doesn't usually have good options for receiving incoming connections. That's why we've got a bunch of NAT traversal protocols and need public hosts to mediate those connections.
A friend of mine would put a "shared" Mac Mini somewhere in the office at almost every job he's ever had, "just in case". Need to let a guest browse the web? The router is failing? Transcode some media? It always came in clutch.
The people working in that office were unaware of what it did, just that it should never be turned off. ;)
1) Navigate in the Finder to /System/Library/CoreServices/
2) Open "CoreTypes.bundle" by right-clicking it and selecting "Sow Package Contents" from the centext menu, then open the "Contents" folder, then "Resources"
3) There they are! Find a suitable icon (preview either with "Get Info" or by double-clicking, which will open them in Preview)
4) In a second window, navigate to the folder you want to decorate.
5) Select it and open its file info with "Get Info" (either using Command + I, the context menu, or "Get Info" in the "File" menu)
6) Drag and drop the .icns file onto the little icon at the top left. (Not onto the big preview.) You have now successfully copied the icns resources.
To revert to the default icon, just select the small icon in the file info and hit delete.
Unfortunately, even if you set a custom icon for a folder, it'll still show as default icon in the sidebar. I wanted to give my ~/dev sidebar entry the developer icon, but sadly it seems to be hardcoded ~/Developer indeed.
Yeah this is what I hoped the article was going to demonstrate, unfortuntely it was just a case of "did you know you had all these system icons already on your system?", to which the answer was "well yeah..."
Ok, after 10 years of Mac OS, I'm only learning this right now?? And I'm stupid because it's right there in the "Go" menu… I used to just launch a terminal and use the "open" command…
Many thanks for this.
The one I like is you can universally change the short cut for paste so that “paste without formatting” is the default CMD-V
Yes, this is a favorite petty grievance of mine: this used to work until some years ago and it was very helpful for quickly navigating to key folders, like those used for your current project, as you hadn't to actually read the sidebar items. For another few OS iterations this could be fixed by add-ons, but then this also wasn't an option anymore. (Apple really invested into making this not an option. I guess, this coincided with Jonathan Ive's takeover of interface design, when clean looks according to design templates became more important than usability.)
"This proxy icon really fuzzes with my clean looks. Let's make it so that is hidden, but, when you hover long enough over it or click it, it will appear and shift to the title to the right. This only causes a break-down of your visual mapping and will force your brain into a 0.2s timeout for reorientation, but my design template is worth it. Now you only have to reposition the mouse pointer and click once again and there you are… — This is really how modeless direct manipulation should be done!"
Who ever did this to my Mac, if you're reading this, repent.
Here's how unevolved I am. I strip every new Mac I buy down to nothing, remove all Apple apps, install Homebrew mysql, apache, nginx, node and php, and then point all my fucking local build shit at...wait for it... the ~/Sites folder because that used to be the place you'd automatically drop things to have built-in apache pick them up and treat them as localhost in 2008, and I just don't want to change where I store shit in my grand 25-year-old file hierarchy. And that icon's still there.
Read that again, but slowly