TechNote

How to make a custom icon for Director projectors

Developers can change the default Director MX 2004 projector icon by creating and using a custom icon.

Specify the custom icon for the projector file

Developers can easily define a specialized icon for a projector file before it is published.

Open the Director file.
Choose File > Publish Settings.
Select the Projector tab, and check Custom icon for application file.
Click the browse button to specify the path to the custom icon file.

Guidelines for creating a custom icon

Use the guidelines below to successfully create an icon for use with Director projectors.

Macintosh

The first thing that Director checks from the icon file during publishing is a resource fork with icon resources. Director transfers the resources it finds to the projector. Director just transfers the first such resource found and renumbers the resources as needed. Here is the list of icon resources:

icl4
icl8
icm#
icm4
icm8
ICN#
ics#
ics4
ics8

Macintosh OS X projectors should have a data fork containing data in the 'icns' format. This is the standard icon format for Macintosh OS X style icons. Usually these files are identified by a .icns extension on the file name. This data is added as a 'icns' resource to the projector.

Windows

Windows icons should have an .ICO filename extension, which contains icon data in multiple resolutions. If the ICO file does not contain all of the icons, only some of the icons will be updated. This allows a projector application to display different icons depending on what icon size Windows chooses to display. The same thing can be done on Macintosh OS 9 if only some of the icon resources are updated. A windows projector contains the following ICON formats.

48x48-pixel, 4-Bit Color
32x32-pixel, 4-Bit Color
16x16-pixel, 4-Bit Color
48x48-pixel, 8-Bit Color
32x32-pixel, 8-Bit Color
16x16-pixel, 8-Bit Color
48x48-pixel, 32-Bit Color
32x32-pixel, 32-Bit Color
16x16-pixel, 32-Bit Color

Note: Custom application icons cannot be created for a cross platform projector. As a workaround, use a resource editor to change the icon of the cross platform projector.