[Wolfie Smith]

Hello Everyone!
I am an Absolute Beginner to the developer side of os x. I work as a digital retoucher/photoshop dude who has a few questions about icons and their potential uses in os X. I recently had to install apple developer tools in order to assemble a plug in for photoshop( it was a monkey-see, monkey-do step by step dictated process) and i noticed and began exploring the icon composer tool. I have managed to assemble and save an icon file (phew!) and i wish to try out an idea for its use: I noticed that the dock has an icon that, once clicked, opens a browser to apples jaguar page- i wish to have a simillar operation perform but with my custom icon which, when clicked, would open up a browser window displaying my works homepage. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how i could accomplish this? Could anyone point me in the right direction towards resources/books/etc.? I had a look on apples extensive developer database but i just got confused(well, you know what designers are like :-) )
I would really appreciate some help on this matter as i would quite fancy trying my arm at writing for osx as it looks pretty cool.
Thanks for taking time to read this!

Wolfie Smith

[VEGAN]

The easiest thing to do would be to make an .html file with your icon and drag it to the Dock.

[Wolfie Smith]

cool, thanks for the tip!
one thing i noticed though, if i have a custom shape with a mask, how do i transfer it to the html file?
i did :get info> cut and paste preview image of .psd file to html document preview. but i got white background instead of masked out background.

Please forgive my total os x amatureism

yours,
Wolfie Smith

[Diggory Laycock]

The springy thing in the dock that points to http://www.apple.com/macosx is a URL.

To create your own URL files drag a URL to the finder from another app

you can drag URLs to the dock.

You can give a URL a custom icon by copy and pasting the icon from another file.

[edit]

just noticed your name:

[Phoenix1701]

IconComposer really isn't the best way to make icons. I would recommend getting Iconographer (www.mscape.com) and IconBuilder (www.iconfactory.com), a Photoshop plug-in. The trick with all of these (except IconBuilder, which does it more or less automatically from a transparent Photoshop layer) is to make sure you have your mask intact. Essentially, you need to extract the alpha channel from your icon in Photoshop, put it in a separate file, and use that file as the mask. (For icons, white is invisible, and black is fully opaque.)

Hope that helps. Icon design is really, really fun.