On Dec 6, 2010, at 3:11 PM, Charlie Dickman wrote: > In the days of System 9 there was a thing known as the desktop database and a > number of applications/utilities that "remembered" the location of things on > the desktop and would restore a saved configuration on command.
Heh. I made one. Clean Desk was the first program I ever sold. I made like $1200 off of that thing. Pretty nice chunk of change when you're 14. :-) > For some time now I have been trying to find a similar OS X implementation > that actually works. All of the ones I have tried mess up when trying to > restore a saved desktop state; some put icons on top of other icons and some > place the icons off the screen. > > I've tried searching the web for a description of where OS X keeps desktop > icon placement information, how to read it and how to save it with no luck. It really hasn't changed. On OS 9 you had to get the position via AppleScript. It's the same now unless you dig into the private file format of .DS_Store (which I spent a loooong time doing for DMG Canvas), but then you can only read the file, not write to it, so you still need to use AppleScript to get/set the file position reliably, unless you're going to force the user to quit Finder, rewrite the private file, and relaunch Finder. -- Seth Willits _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
