[macrophyllum]

Is the best way to have a timer which when fired changes the application icon? So that if I had a dock icon that was animated, like iSync, I would include in my project 20-30 images and the timer would change them (using setApplicationIcon:) so that it animates?

Is there a better way to do it?

Thanks.

[Rickster]

Yeah, that'd work. It's pretty much what I did for JARED.

Depending on what kind of animation you're doing, you might find it more efficient to generate your images at run time than to include a whole bunch of TIFFs in your app wrapper. For example, an effect like the pulsing default button could be created using two images and some fading between them, or a spinning animation could be generated from a single image and some graphics context transformation.

Remember, if you're thinking about implementing Dock icon animation in your app, consider the usefulness versus obtrusiveness factor.

[macrophyllum]

Thanks again Rickster. I may or may not add the icon animation in my app. If I do, I will make it so that the user can turn it off in the prefs.

[macrophyllum]

So how does Mail draw their numbers in the new messages badge?

[smeger]

Also, keep in mind that if you do something like this, your app is going to show high CPU usage numbers. That's important to some people.

[Nebagakid]

Originally posted by macrophyllum:
So how does Mail draw their numbers in the new messages badge?

it has a base icon, and then three badges ( for 1 digits, 2 digits, 3 digits) that are red... then, on top of those badges it adds the number....

[macrophyllum]

So how does it add the number? There aren't images for each number are there? I couldn't find any so I thought it "drew" them on the image during runtime.

[Phoenix1701]

It does. If you wanted to get really fancy, you could dynamically generate the entire icon in code as a bunch of regions, lines, text, etc. I wouldn't recommend it, but it's possible.

[macrophyllum]

So how hard is it to just generate the numbers on the badge like in Mail?

[Nebagakid]

does anyone know the right stuff to sift through the MAIL code?

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by macrophyllum:
So how hard is it to just generate the numbers on the badge like in Mail?

Drawing numbers onto an image is trivial. Like so:

Code:
NSImage *image = [[NSImage alloc] initWithSize:NSMakeSize(50, 50)];
NSString *string = @"5";
[image lockFocus];
[string drawAtPoint:NSZeroPoint withAttributes:nil];
[image unlockFocus];

[macrophyllum]

That is cool. One last question, how do you change text size, color, etc?

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by macrophyllum:
That is cool. One last question, how do you change text size, color, etc?

The attributes dictionary.