An image well, a Classic application, and a pair of utility libraries walk into a bar….
Hm, not bad – the punchline is left as an exercise for the reader – but I have in mind not so much humor as some sort of confrontation or showdown:
The Find_icon library keeps one hand poised above its holster and eyes its rival, the MoreIsBetter library, standing across the dusty town square….
Who wins at high noon?
Well, let’s back up a step: what are they fighting about? A demure image well stands to one side, hoping against hope that someone will bring it the file icon it so richly deserves.
Getting a file icon can be very easy indeed, nothing to fight over: GetIconRefFromFile() works from 8.5 on, including OS X.
But if you want to support earlier than 8.5 (and I do, for reasons I won’t go into right now), you need a way to get that file icon for every kind of file system object: a file, a folder, a file with a custom icon, etc. etc.
The first library I found that solves this problem is Find_icon, by James W. Walker, available from http://jwwalker.com/pages/find_icon.html. As with the best of these kinds of libraries, it has a rich history of support and fixes.
However, its contender, MoreIsBetter, available from http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/MoreIsBetter/MoreIsBetter.html, should have left it lying in the dirt after the first shot. Why? It has an even more illustrious history, is officially supported by Apple, and has been worked on by some of the sharpest developers there. But, for finding file icons, it can’t shoot straight.
For one, it doesn’t work properly in Panther. Now, this may be because I’m using a Classic application to talk to the OS X Finder (sending an Apple event to the Finder is the generally accepted way to get a file icon). Classic applications certainly aren’t Apple’s priority any more, but I think there’s a decent chance it won’t work from OS X apps either – I would bet it just hasn’t been officially tested under Panther.
For two, when I used it under earlier OSes, I found an egregious programming error – something I caught in my first try. Isn’t anyone else testing this thing? (I’ll send in a bug report, don’t worry.)
For three, even under older OSes, the icons it retrieves are garbage images. Unusable. But it reports no error. And I don’t have time to debug it right now.
I suspect no one’s testing this because MoreIsBetter is currently listed under “Legacy Technologies”. While MoreIsBetter does support older OSes (I was able to get it to compile for 68K), it does proudly support Carbon and OS X. In fact, it provides many functions that Carbon doesn’t and that would be painful to code yourself.
So why is it abandoned under “Legacy”? I don’t know, and it’s a shame. This gunslinger shouldn’t be retired just yet.
Addendum: I’ve been looking around for Carbon resources the same way I’m gathering Cocoa resources on the Web, and MoreIsBetter is a good example of why I can’t find them: the best examples are often labeled “legacy” or merely “Macintosh”, since they date back to a time when the Toolbox APIs that preceded Carbon were all there was of Macintosh APIs. So when I do finally present my Carbon links, don’t expect them to label themselves that way.
Weaponized Fluff 