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How to Change the New Icons in MacOS X.

With the arrival of MacOS X beta came big beautiful 128 x128 icons that scale in size all the way down to 16 x 16. While you can still change most individual icons by pasting a replacement into the Get Info window (now called The Inspector), how do you change the Trash, default folder, and other System-wide icons? This tutorial will show you how.

First a little history lesson. In Classic applications, the file is divided into two parts: the Data fork (generally for code), and the Resource fork (for icons, PICTs, and tons of other goodies).

With MacOS X, the Resource fork is being phased out. My guess as to why would be that having a file split into two forks made networking with different file systems difficult. Remember, they removed the Resource fork, not the resources. Apple still uses resources, they just moved them into the Data fork.

Huh?

It's true. In many of the MacOS X dot-app folders is a file with the .rsrc extension. This file is loaded with good-old ResEdit resources stored in the data fork. All you need to open them is a utility that copies the data fork into the resource fork, and then after editing, reverses the process.

The tool you need to make this job easier is QuickConvert. This program allows you to copy the data fork into the resource fork so it can be edited in ResEdit. It runs under both Classic and MacOS X, but to simplify file preference access, you should be booting in standard MacOS 9 when changing icons.

Below is a table of the new icons used in the MacOS X Finder. The resource ID numbers are the same from way back in System 7.0!

Everyone's favorite first icon to change is the Trash. (Really it's two icons, Full and Empty).

Pick your favorite pair (Full/Empty) and open them in ResEdit. The icns resource is where the 32 bit icon is stored.

You need to change the ID number of the icns resource to match the trash cans in the table above. When you're finished, the Full Trash ID should be
-3984 and the Empty -3993.

Now that your replacements are correctly prepared, we need a place to put them!

For the MacOS X Finder, the icons are stored in a file called HIToolbox.rscr. While booted into MacOS 9, locate it in the folder shown below. Duplicate the resource file as a backup.

Drag the HIToolbox.rscr onto QuickConvert to swap the data and resource forks so you can edit the file using ResEdit.

Open HIToolbox.rscr in ResEdit and marvel at your handy work as you gaze upon the previously inaccessible ResEdit resources.

Open your previously prepared Trash icons. Click once on the Full Trash icns resource and copy it to the clipboard. Paste it into ResourceFork. When the dialog box appears asking if you want to replace resources with the same ID numbers, select YES.

After repeating the procedure for the Empty Trash folder, save your work and quit ResEdit.

The final step is to use QuickConvert to copy the modified resource fork back into the data fork of HIToolbox.rscr.

Do this by dragging HIToolbox.rscr back onto the QuickConvert application icon.

After making sure HIToolbox.rscr is in the correct location, reboot into MacOS X to see your handy work.

If you want to do more extensive editing or replacement of your icons, I recommend Iconographer. It lets you view, replace, and edit large form icons for MacOS X (or MacOS 9).

Pete Loats reminds us to make sure the Iconographer preferences are be set to "Mac OS Icon Saving - Data fork only".