Give PC documents customized icons

Dec 28, '01 09:39:55AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

Fed up with seeing generic white sheets for all your PC documents? So was I so I opened up the Appleworks application and fixed it. Show the Appleworks package contents (control-click on the AppleWorks application and select Show Package Contents) and find the file called Info-macos.plist. Open this in BBEdit or TextEdit or whatever and find this line:

<key>CFBundleTypeName</key>   <string>com.apple.appleworks.word</string>
Look at the paragraph above it and copy the line that defines the icon, and paste it into the appropriate place under the line you just found:
<key>CFBundleTypeIconFile</key>   <string>Document.icns</string>
You can change the Documents.icns to whatever you want (but the actual .icns file you specify must exist one level down from this document, in the Resources folder). I'm going to make a new icon so I can tell at a glance what's a Word document, but for now this at least will give it some colour. Do the same with the Excel definition and that'll sort it.

You WILL have to update prebindings for this to take effect. Open the terminal and type:
sudo update_prebinding -root /
[Editor's note: I have not tried this myself, but it makes sense and I verified the structure of the Info.plist file ... I wonder how this would be done without AppleWorks?]

Comments (2)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20011228093955774