Icon changes

[casa@unm.edu (Jim Pittman)]

I'm posting this in case there are other too-new-to-the-IIgs people who
haven't heard of this phenomenon - I don't know if it is a problem.

I'm running System 6.0.1 on a ROM 01 IIgs. I thought it would be neat
to color-code some of my folders. So I did, but one day I popped an old
diskette in the 3.5 drive (it was a GS+ magazine disk if it matters)
and double-clicked on it. I intended to just look at the directory of
files on the disk, and that's what I saw. I didn't open any files or
folders on the disk but just clicked the Close button.

Next I opened one of my hard drive partitions and I saw that all my
color-coded folders had been changed to uniform yellow folders - with an
elongated shape and with shadows along the bottoms! Not the "original"
appearance of the folders at all! The contents did not seem to have
changed. Upon re-starting the computer my colored icons went back to
their correct color codings.

I was amazed that simply opening a diskette without accessing any of the
files on it could make this change. Obviously I don't understand all I
know about how icons are controlled.

The following explanation comes from Jimmy Shaw (quoted w/o permission):

> What happens is (I think) the GS+ disk comes with its own icons for
> certain folders. And as I understand it, the finder reads the icons
> and replaces the previous ones with the last one it reads. I assume
> that when you pop in the GS+ disk, it comes up after all the hard disk
> partitions. Therefore, the icons on the GS+ disk replace all the
> previous icons. Thus the change.
> 
> You don't have to run a program. When you pop in a disk, finder tries
> to find the finder droppings files, and the icons in the icon folder.
> 
> Hope this helps... Ask the nice people on comp.sys.apple2 about it if
> you want to know for sure.  :)
> 
> Jimmy

Well, this seems to be an odd way to run a railroad. I would never have
expected that just looking at a disk's directory would affect the way
the rest of the systems' directories would look.

Another small step in trying to understand GS/OS.

- Jim Pittman - University of New Mexico - casa@unm.edu