So, you'd like to customize your Mac OS 7, 8 or 9 desktop by changing the Apple logo in the top/left corner? You know, you can customize way more than just this using one of the thousands of pre-made Kaleidoscope Schemes (look inside kaleidoscope_schemes.zip).  And of course, if you're a programmer, you could use ResEdit and fiddle with hex code and try to replace your System file's icon resource, but oh man, that's a risky move! Please don't go that route.

There are a variety of utilities that can safely replace your Apple menu logo with something else, for instance SuperApple is a control panel that allows you to select a B&W animation that will play all day long in place of your Apple menu logo! Sadly, it's not available in color.  Zipple does! But besides animation, wouldn't it be awesome if you could draw (in color) exactly what you wanted in place of that Apple menu icon? Well, as a matter of fact, you can draw and replace any icon you want in your Classic Mac OS without any programming skill and without risking anything!

 

On the computer you want to edit the top/left Apple logo (and many other icons) here's what you could do:

 

1) Make sure you have a copy of Kaleidoscope installed (don't forget to reboot after installation)

2) Make sure you have a copy of D'Studio

3) Now, launch D'Studio and pull the FILE menu at the top and choose OPEN FILE...

4) If you're not taken straight to the Kaleidoscope Schemes folder, click the "Open K Schemes Folder" button, and then select "Apple Platinum" and click OPEN.

 

5) Then, you'll see the whole D'Studio interface windows open and you'll want to pull down the small "Document" menu at the bottom of the resource selector screen (depicted by #1) named here as "Apple platinum" (it's named like this, because that's the scheme file name we opened) and then select the "Menus" item (depicted by #2).

 

6) Alright, now, you will see D'Studio interface change to the following and what you'll want to do is to click on the Apple menu logo (depicted by #1), since that's what we want to edit.  You'll notice a warning message on the left pane, this is because the Apple Platinum scheme does not use this resource.  It uses the default Mac OS Apple menu icon.  We'll override this by adding this resource (depicted by #2).

 

7) Now you can draw and/or copy paste graphics in there to make it look like exactly like you want.  The B&W mask icon placeholders you see in the lower part of the left pane should reflect, in black, every pixel that should be visible and in white, every pixel that should be transparent.  You can drag and drop one icon placeholder onto another one to copy (and dither) the icon easily.  Just make sure your mask is representative, because sometimes during the dithering, some pixels that should be black are left white and this makes transparent pixels where you would not want any.  You can also see in real time the changes you draw in the top/left part of the right pane ("Apple platinum")

 

8) When you're done editing the icon(s) we'll save the scheme as a copy, just to make sure we don't destroy the original Apple platinum scheme.  So pull the FILE menu at the top and choose SAVE AS...

9) Then, launch the Kaleidoscope control panel and click the SELECT SCHEME button in the lower/right corner and select your scheme file you just saved out of D'Studio.  Or, alternatively, you could simply double-click your scheme file in the Finder and it will automatically apply it! Look at this beauty! ;-)

 

D'Studio lets you modify just about ANY part of any window or icon.  Hope you enjoy it as much as I did... It's a shame no such thing exists anymore!