Hello, I need some help. I'd like to know what part of the HFS format is responsible for how icons on an external CD-volume appear on the desktop of Mac OS 9. The desktop database holds the icon info but where is info. like Window-sizing on the Mac, no. of icons per row, spacing of icons etc. stored ? Is this stored on the hard-disk of the Mac or is there some way in which I can get this to be stored on my CD as well ? Is this part of the desktop database too ?
The situation is as follows - when I insert my HFS-CD into my drive and click on the CD-symbol a window opens up displaying the icons for all the files present on the CD but they are not spaced properly and the view doesn't look all that good - Is there some way in which I can display these properly ? ..ie. say 'n' icons in one row etc ? Sometimes there are around 30 icons displayed for around 100 files on my CD... then a lot of empty space is displayed - which could mislead the user to think that no more files are present - and then the remaining 70 file-icons suddenly show up.
I presume this doesn't have to be stored on the external HFS-volume but rather has something to do with my Mac-OS settings... but I'm not too sure. I'd appreciate it if someone could tell me which part is responsible for such things ? I'm not creating a desktop DB at the moment but this looks really bad and I'd like to change it if I can i.e. if this can be overcome somehow without having a desktop database on my CD.
TIA, Nandini
********** It's not easy to find happiness in ourselves and it's not possible to find it elsewhere ************
Hi Nandini,
The information the Finder uses to organize a window's layout is stored in the Finder Info for the folder in question (where things like the scroll position, view organization etc. are stored) and the Finder Info for the individual items (each of which stores the position for the item, for instance).
The Finder will set the layout information for a file if it sees the "Inited" flag in the FinderInfo's flags field cleared. Once a position in the window has been assigned and the Finder has done its housekeeping like reading application icons out of an application's resource fork the Finder sets the "Inited" bit to prevent doing the same work again in the future.
The layout of this Finder Info field is contained in the various "Inside Macintosh" volumes, as well as header files like "Files.h". It's probably on-line in some technote on Apple's web site, too.
Hope that helps, -Patrick.
On Wednesday, April 24, 2002, at 11:06 PM, Entwicklung wrote:
Hello, I need some help. I'd like to know what part of the HFS format is responsible for how icons on an external CD-volume appear on the desktop of Mac OS 9. The desktop database holds the icon info but where is info. like Window-sizing on the Mac, no. of icons per row, spacing of icons etc. stored ? Is this stored on the hard-disk of the Mac or is there some way in which I can get this to be stored on my CD as well ? Is this part of the desktop database too ? The situation is as follows - when I insert my HFS-CD into my drive and click on the CD-symbol a window opens up displaying the icons for all the files present on the CD but they are not spaced properly and the view doesn't look all that good - Is there some way in which I can display these properly ? ..ie. say 'n' icons in one row etc ? Sometimes there are around 30 icons displayed for around 100 files on my CD... then a lot of empty space is displayed - which could mislead the user to think that no more files are present - and then the remaining 70 file-icons suddenly show up. I presume this doesn't have to be stored on the external HFS-volume but rather has something to do with my Mac-OS settings... but I'm not too sure. I'd appreciate it if someone could tell me which part is responsible for such things ? I'm not creating a desktop DB at the moment but this looks really bad and I'd like to change it if I can i.e. if this can be overcome somehow without having a desktop database on my CD. TIA, Nandini ********** It's not easy to find happiness in ourselves and it's not possible to find it elsewhere ************