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Changing an Applications Document Icons
For this week's screenshots, I'm featuring the Kaleidoscope color scheme, Light Ultra.
While wandering through the Info-Mac HyperArchive, I stumbled upon a nice set of 3D document icons called Max's Custom 3D Icon Pack.
Covering 13 different applications, Max provides you with ResEdit icon resources with matching ID numbers that easily paste into your programs.
We'll use his icons in this week's hack outlining the procedure to permanantly change application icons. This is different than doing a Get Info on a document and pasting in a different icon. By changing the document icon in the application, every document you create will automatically have the new icon.
 After making a copy of SimpleText open it up in ResEdit.
Open Max's 3D SimpleText icons with ResEdit.
Our goal is to copy the icon resources from Max and paste them into the same ID numbers in SimpleText. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as hightlighting and copying ic14 and pasting it into SimpleText because we would loose the icon for QuickDraw 3D since SimpleText has more icons than Max provide to us.
Instead, we need to open each icon group, one at a time, and copy all the icons from Max into SimpleText.
Specifically: Open icl4 in Max's icons, select all the ID numbers at once using Command-A, copy all the ID's using Command-C.
Then switch to the SimpleText program window and open icl4. Paste in all the icons. You'll get a dialog box like the one pictured below. Since we want to replace the old icons, click Yes.
Max's Icons Pasted into SimpleText
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You will need to repeat this routine for icl8, ICN#, ics#, ics8, ics4.
After a couple of applications, it will become a routine:
Open... Select All... Copy... Close
Switch... Open... Paste... Yes... Close
Even if you think you're never going to run your monitor in Black and White mode, you need to copy the ICN# and ics# resources because they contain the MASKS that allow all the icons to appear properly.
After changing the icons, save your new SimpleText and quit ResEdit. Unlike most programs on your computer, you may have more than one copy of SimpleText. To make sure the Desktop Database gets the correct icons, you should trash all your other versions of SimpleText.
Restart the computer to use your new icons.
 This is another collection of 3D icons I found on the net. There was no READ ME with them. If you know the author, please let me know so I give him//her credit. The set includes icons for many Microsoft apps, plus Photoshop, ResEdit, SimpleText, and many more. They're not organized as nice as Max's, but they'll help add to your 3D desktop look.
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