January 30, 1997
• The Concept
Once upon a time, I (Mark Simmons) was leafing condescendingly through a Windows-oriented publication, when I caught sight of some very good icon craftsmanship — to wit, the control panel icons from Windows 3.1, which feature a great three-dimensional rendition of a generic PC. Impressed by Microsoft’s work (I must admit, they occasionally produce some very nice icons), I resolved to even the scales by producing similar renditions of the various members of the Macintosh family.
Months of toil and research later, you, the user, now stand to benefit from my obsessive labors. I hope the results speak for themselves.
These icons, constituting as they do a Ziff-Davis exclusive utility, may not be uploaded to any other on-line service, bulletin board or network; used on any shareware or public-domain disk or CD-ROM collection; or used for any commercial purpose. However, we encourage you to share them with other individuals — friends, co-workers, distant relatives — until from sea to shining sea, every Mac desktop is adorned with the appropriate icons and all those poor PC-users rush out to buy a Mac of their own.
• The more things change…
Recent modifications to the Custom Icon Pack are as follows:
Version 4.0
This release features many new icons by icon artist extraordinaire, Michael Irwin. Most significant is the addition of many new Mac-compatible and server icons. Also included are the @World and Spartacus icons, and many new additions in all categories.
Version 3.0
This release features all-new icons, originally designed for the Macintosh Catalog 450. The lineup of computers has been updated and reorganized, and I’ve added the current roster of Mac compatibles (“clones,” to be crass). I’ve omitted the resources for “About This Macintosh…” from this version, since Apple no longer lets you see anything in this dialog at all.
• Applying the Custom Icons
The Macintosh icons in this collection represent between them every member of the Macintosh family at the time of publishing. They should make ideal icons for your hard disk, System Folder, or whatever; your imagination is the limit!
The files themselves are SimpleText documents. When opened, they simply tell you how to apply custom icons and what models of Macintosh they can be used to represent. The custom icons can be copied and pasted in the normal System 7 fashion; select the file, choose “Get Info” from the File menu, click on the icon in the Get Info dialog, and copy and paste the icon to your heart’s content.
• Further dabbling
You can also use the appropriate Mac icon in place of the Finder’s generic compact Mac icon, if you don’t mind a little copy-and-paste. Another option is to use a shareware or commercial icon editor, many of which make icon management as simple as a little drag-and-drop. You’ll need to doctor the icon family with an ID number of 3 in the System file in order to change the Finder’s icon; restart, holding down the Command and Option keys, to rebuild the desktop and see the changed icon.
It used to be possible to modify the icons that appear in the Finder’s “About This Macintosh…” dialog, but recent versions of the Mac OS no longer display a representative icon here. If you’re using a shareware utility that restores this charming feature, you can experiment with pasting Custom Icon Pack icons into the utility’s resources. (Of course, I’m sure the authors of such utilities would prefer that you not distribute copies that have been thus modified.)
Mark Simmons and Michael Irwin
Misc
out of 10 (1 vote)
104 / 
2023-09-18 / 
24b013be6bc9f82510d7ba4befab70b191e69c47 / 
/ 
MacUser-Custom-Icon-Pack-IV.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
