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Important Compatibility Warning

Download URL: cdiconkiller15.bin Why is CDIconKiller so cool? Compatibility notes and known bugs (if any)

MacUser's rating: three out of five mice. Geoff Duncan praises CDIconKiller in TidBITS #287. We think CDIconKiller is so important that we include it on our CD every month. MacFormat Magazine Italia, July 1997  macpool Best of Selection

Why is CDIconKiller so cool?

Suppose you want the extension to be inactive (show all icons) except when you hold down the Command (cloverleaf) key. Open the 'cdev' resource with ResEdit (Open Using Hex Editor) and change "6632" to "6732" and "6624" to "6724".

The full source code is included for your convenience.

Original work by Quinn and Peter N Lewis.

And if you just want to suppress custom icons on your hard disk, try Folder Icon Cleaner.

Compatibility issues and known bugs

• Frederic Blondiau reports that CDIconKiller does not work any more on Mac OS 9. Based on what I read in TechNote 1176: Mac OS 9 CDIconKiller should do nothing at all, so you might as well remove it from the Startup Items folder, until a solution is found.

• Under Mac OS 8.1, if you turn on Balloon Help in the Finder, you crash. The obvious workaround is to turn on Balloon Help from another application.

• If you use Alessandro Levi Montalcini's Finder View Settings you need version 1.2 or later.

• There is one known interference with Now Utilities 6.5, reported by Howard Chansky. A type 10 Finder error occurs every time he tries to place an item using the Now Folder Menu feature. The crash used to occur with Now 5 and 6 too.

• Rahul Sen Gupta reports this weird Finder (as of 7.5.5) bug: with CDIconKiller 1.4 installed in the Startup Items Folder, the Launcher control panel does not open automatically after restart, if the relevant setting is turned on in the General Controls control panel.

  To work around this:

  1. move CDIconKiller anywhere on your startup disk;
  2. make an alias to it, and put the alias into your Startup Items folder;
  3. rename the alias so that CDIconKiller starts after the Launcher: "zCDIconKiller" will do.

  In the German System Software (the one Rahul Sen Gupta is using) the Launcher is dubbed Klickstarter; General Controls is Allgemeine Einstellungen.

  Update: James Prescott reports that this workaround is also required for Silver Volumes (part of the Silverlining formatting software).

CDIconKiller used to support slow devices such as floppies and networked disks, but I removed this feature since it could permanently (instead of temporarily) turn off the custom icons. CDIconKiller would disable custom icons on writable devices permanently, that is, it would turn off the custom icon attribute bit. Unfortunately, the technique used by CDIconKiller was devised with a read-only device in mind.

My Folder Icon Cleaner utility can fix this problem if occurring on folders.