jeremy, on Apr 17 2004, 09:03 PM, said:
Yeah, while I like the new icon, having the ability to make it gray would be nice; the larger swath of yellow up there does stick out a little much. Definitely not a big deal.
You can edit the icon yourself if you really want AND if you're not afraid of using Resourcerer (or some other resource editor that can deal with data fork resources).
The icon (the one that appears as the title of the input menu) exists as a 'kcns' resource inside the Spell Catcher.component/Contents/Resources/Spell Catcher.rsrc file.
You only need the 16x16 32-bit one w/8-bit and 1-bit mask (you can define the other 16x16 ones, but I don't think they will be used - other sizes are not used AFAIK).
To use Resourcerer's icns editor, you have to temporarily change the resource type to 'icns' (can't get the synonyms to work for this somehow).
To use another icon editor (Iconographer for instance), you'd need to do some copying and pasting of hex from the .icns file format that it generally saves to. Same goes for using the existing one as a starting point - you'd have to create a regular .icns file, copy and paste the hex from the kcns resource into the .icns file - you get the idea.
It's unfortunately not possible to either change this icon on-the-fly, or even have some sort of option or preference to use a different one. This is because it's generally frowned-upon for an app (or other executable entity) to modify its contents (whether that means a file inside its package, or one of its resources if it's not a packaged app) because there's no guarantee that a given user's permissions allow it. So there's just no (sanctioned and safe) way to have some sort of preference to "use grayscale icon".
Not just that, there are other complications with input methods. If you do the above surgery, you'll notice that the change doesn't apply properly right away. You still have to log out and in again (or restart) for the OS to recognize the new icon. So even if I COULD implement an option to do this, you'd have to log out and in for it to take effect.
I think there are already enough times when it's necessary to log out/in or restart when you install/update/modify languages/plug-ins/whatever with SCX that we don't need another.
When Apple makes this possible on Panther (it is, but not for the class of input methods that Spell Catcher falls into) then I'll be able to do something about this. It's already enough of a bummer that I can't indicate the state of interactive checking or auto-show suggestions in the menu title on Panther. But I know that Apple's looking at this, so I do have hope. I doubt we'd see it before OS X 10.4, though (i.e. not in a Panther bug-fix update).
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