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Edit Launcher Colors
With a little work, you can customize Apple's included Launcher to match any Kaleidoscope scheme! The scheme featured here is MagLite by Frank Turk.
The row of buttons along the top are called "Category Buttons". They represent a folder within the Launcher Items that is preceded by a bullet (option-8). You can have up to eight different categories, each with a different color set. Each category can have its own button size: small, medium, and large.
Before we dig in and see the resources, there's one trick to this edit. You will be editing resources in the Launcher, but as soon as you launch it, those color settings are copied into the preference file in the System folder. Everytime you make a change to a resource, you must throw away the preferences before you run the Launcher.
 Open a copy of the Launcher in ResEdit and find the mash resource.
Open it with a double click.
Open ID# -4033 with a double-click.
What you will see is a long list of all the color locations. They will all be explained below.
The colors are laid out in Red Blue Green fomat. Each color is often repeated twice as shown on the left.
Unfortunately, they are grouped oddly - a group of four followed by a group of two
In the example shown, you would have red text, on a blue background, surrounded by a green box.
 Since there can be eight different category color combinations, some items have 48 numbers that are in groups of 6.
In the graphic above, the colors are numbered to show how the groups of 6 are laid out. The harderst part of this edit, is getting comfortable with the odd groupings of the numbers, but after only a few minutes, I was jumping around the resources like a pro. I chose the MagLite scheme because it involved shades of greys - RBG numbers that are easy to enter.
Once you are comfortable with the resources, the trick will be to get the correct colors. I used Apple's supplied color picker extension, but you should also take a look at RGB Calculator III.
The graphic below shows how each resource ID relates to the Launcher. The Window Foreground/Background color combination can be used to set a subtle checkered pattern, or make the numbers the same for a solid color. The same is true of the Panel color.
Changing colors in addition to changing the fonts makes Apple's Launcher one of the most customizable Launchers on the market. All it will take is a little work from you! |
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