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Creating Startup Screens
Are you tired of staring at the same MacOS smiling face as your extensions load?
Did you know you can replace it with the full screen picture of your choice.
For example, my wife is a kindergarten school teacher. Every morning when she powers up her classroom Mac, a cute pictue of the whole class adorns the screen until the startup process is complete.
This picture sits loosely in the System Folder with the special name of StartupScreen. But not any old picture can be StartupScreen. A StartupScreen has some very special properties that go way back to the early days of the MacOS.
For a while now we have been using ResEdit to alter the resources in a file. What you may not know, is that a graphic or photo saved in PICT format has the picture saved as a ResEdit resource.
All it takes to turn a PICT into a StartupScreen is to give the picture resource an ID of zero.
At your son's birthday party, you took a QuickCam picture of him and his friends riding the bumper cars at Kiddyland. You want put the picture on the kid's computer so that every time he turns it on, he remembers what a great dad you are for making his party a huge success.
We start off with a Jpeg file
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Open the picture in a graphics program (for this example. I'll use GraphicConverter).
First, you will need to resize the picture to match your monitor resoultion.
To do this, select menu item:
Picture->Size->Scale and enter your screen size.
GraphicConverter makes the next part easy. From the File menu select Save As... In the dialog box, use the popup menu to select Startup Screen and click OK.
If you're using Photoshop, you can save the pictue as a PICT resource and give it an ID number of 0 (zero).
The StartupScreen in ResEdit
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To make sure we're done it right, open the StartupScreen in ResEdit. Depending on which graphic program you used, the resources will vary, but you must have at least the PICT resource.
Open the PICT resource with a double-click.
PICT resource with ID 0
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Again, depending on the application used, you may have more than one ID number.
One will be the actual StartupScreen, and the other could be a thumbnail preview for Open/Save dialog boxes.
The important thing to note is that the PICT has an ID of 0.
It's so important because if you place a StartupScreen in the System folder, and it doesn't contain an ID of 0, the computer will crash with a buss error, and the only way around it is to boot from a CD or floppy, and remove the StartupScreen from the System!
To recap the requirements for a StartupScreen:
1. It must be named StartupScreen
2. It is placed loose in the System Folder.
3. It is a graphic stored in PICT format
4. The PICT resource has an ID of 0 (zero)
5. It should be sized for your monitor.
ScreenMan
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A great utility I've found for managing StartupScreens is ScreenMan.
ScreenMan allows you to store many startup PICTs in the StartupScreen.
Then it rotates which PICT has an ID of 0 at each startup.
Like a desktop picture, a StartupScreen is a little known way to customize your Mac.
You can download some Startups from info-mac, or stop by GUI-Junky and peruse his selections.
That's it for this week.
If you have any comments or suggestions for hacks, drop me a line with DM somewhere in the subject.
Michael Coyle |
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