Animated icons in the Dock.

[rharder]

Matrix Agent, I like your idea. I think it's up to the application to keep its icon up to date (like Mail.app does), so we'll have to bug our favorite app vendors to include that feature.

Of course when I say "bug" I mean "politely ask."

-Rob

[monty]

for all those interested it seems like you can update a programs icon by calling a single method:
[NSApp setApplicationIconImage:anImage];

So it is fairly simple in cocoa at least. Anyone no if it is even possible in a carbon app?

Peter

[DArnaez]

Please guys. I want to contact with any of you that know or can help me to do this animated icons. I do these stuf for Windows but I can find a software to can use my PNG sequences to do animated icons that can work on desktop or at least on the dock.
Please check my stuff on www.cryo64.com It could be fantastic and unique. Thanks!

[Giaguara]

You revived a 8 years old thread about Mac OS X dock icons to ask for help for Windows software?

[DArnaez]

No no... I want to do the same that I already do for WIndows but now I want to do it also for Mac. I want to do animated icons for Mac OSX.

[ElDiabloConCaca]

There is no such thing as "animated" icons in the Dock. You can change a Dock's icon to display useful information, and, if you wish for a "hack," you can simply change the icon over and over again in a loop to give the illusion of animation. Plenty of programs do this -- Adium (a chat program) does this.

If you still wish to pursue this, read up on what monty posted. It's the Objective-C call for changing a Dock's icon within a program.

With that being said, you cannot create an "animated" icon outside of a program. Icons themselves are static by nature. You would have to create a full-fleged Mac OS X application in order to create an animated icon for that application.

[DArnaez]

I see... well, the idea is that icons play a image sequence when mouse is over. In DesktopX (unfortunately only for Windows) I use an static png image (ie. 96x96 px) for the icon and for the mouse over I do a PNG file pasting frame by frame, side by side doing the sequence (96x480 px). So the program Play the images creating the illusion.
You mentioned about to create that "simply changing the icon over and over again". And THAT is my point! How do that? I can't find a sowtware to do these things in Mac and I can't believe it. Mac environment is by far vary much solid than Windows...
Thanks!

[ElDiabloConCaca]

It doesn't appear that there is software for Mac OS X that will take static icons and allow you to replace them with animated ones.

The only way to do this would be to create your own program, using the XCode IDE, and create a program that has an animated icon. You would do this by creating a new Mac OS X application, importing your icons, then calling the [NSApp setApplicationIconImage:anImage] method over and over. This is usually not used to animate icons; rather, it's used to place status badges and what-not on the icon... like the Mail icon's number of unread messages badge.

If you're not a programmer, and you're not familiar with the Objective-C language, then you're at a dead-end. You will not and cannot animate icons in OS X, then.

I think what you're trying to do is replace icons in Mac OS X with animated versions of those icons -- you cannot do this. You can only control the animation of an icon in a program that you created.