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bousozoku

Moderator emeritus
Jun 25, 2002
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wrldwzrd89 said:
I want that funky icon problem fixed! I experience it on an irregular basis on my iMac, and it's the most annoying thing ever! It's only cosmetic, but it gets on my nerves. Should I send feedback to Apple, or has everyone else done it already?

If you describe it to Apple as "funky icon problem", they're not going to be able to do much. If you're talking about the icon/text residue on the desktop problem, I haven't had that since 10.3.3.
 

wrldwzrd89

macrumors G5
Jun 6, 2003
12,110
77
Solon, OH
bousozoku said:
If you describe it to Apple as "funky icon problem", they're not going to be able to do much. If you're talking about the icon/text residue on the desktop problem, I haven't had that since 10.3.3.
The problem I'm having is that randomly, some icons become wrong, garbled, or blank. Force-quitting the Finder or logging out then back in clears up the issue temporarily.
 

King Cobra

macrumors 603
Mar 2, 2002
5,403
0
Yeah, same here.

This is something I posted back over at TheTechPub in the middle of January with 10.3.2 (and the problem still occurs with me today):

(Original post edited to seem more correctly documented)

I noticed that some of my Stuffit .sit and .sitx icons were vanishing without my permission. Yeah, vanishing. For instance, on Jan. 14, I created several stand alone Java apps and packaged them through the Finder (control-click on folder with the things I want to cram in it, then go to Stuffit > Archive > Stuff (.sit)), and a few of them returned absolutely no icons, not a stuffit icon, nada. One of the packages returned a Stuffit Deluxe icon, not an expander icon. In order to view the "missing" icon, I had to get info on it. To restore the icon, I had to click on the square to the left of the file name in the Get Info window, and hit Delete....

On Jan. 15, something similar happened to a program called "banking.sitx" I received in November of 2003. First, the icon would vanish when I clicked on it (and then when I clicked elsewhere), and I had to view it with Get Info. But...for this package, when I went to Get Info, the icon was a Stuffit Expander icon moved up about 10 pixels, and four colored squiggle marks on the bottom (they looked like either mini-IE logos, or mini-(Quicktime version 3 plug-in) logos). Several hours later, I go to the directory with the "banking.sitx" package, and there is a new visible logo. Without clicking on it, I can see the bottom half of the exclamation speech bubble at the top part of the icon. Under that, there are four smaller icons, divided into a square-like grid. The left side has a yellow triangle with a "!" inside of it, and below that, there is a red octagon with the "!" symbol in it. When I changed my view options to more than 32 x 32 (current), the icon changes to an exclamation speech bubble...but it reverts when I set the slider back to 32 x 32. On the right side are the two shapes, but moved up in the whole visible icon by one pixel. (All four icons are vertically compressed 50%.) I did the Get Info --> delete icon procedure on it, and, that time, I got my regular Stuffit Expander icon back. What the hell was that about?

There was also the similar "!" speech bubble + quad grid mini-icon look with nearly every .rtf file on my Hard Drive, except...the top two mini-icons are different. (Preamble: About two or three years ago, I made a custom made icon for a folder, called "Scales," and it is a colored clock-like design with text at the N, S, E and W positions. I have not gotten info and copied the icon in over a year, and I have refreshed my computer many times since then.) For the .rtf files, the top two icons are the "Scales" folder logo! Again, all four mini-icons are compressed. Just like before, I got rid of the wierd icon through the Get Info procedure. And, sometimes, I also got rid of ALL the wierd .rtf file icons by going into a folder within the directory as the text files, then browsing back one step to the directory with the .rtf files.

Also, my movies folder had a red octagon icon with a white "!" in it, uncompressed. When I do View Options on it, the icon stays the same, until I reduce the view size to minimum. Then I get the "!" in a speech bubble, uncompressed. The delete icon procedure falied, and so did going into a subdirectory, then navigating back one step. The Movies folder icon persists.
 

1macker1

macrumors 65816
Oct 9, 2003
1,375
0
A Higher Level
I have a similar problem, when i move large amounts of files from my desktop to a folder in the finder, all the icons disappear, but then come back in like 5 seconds. It's not a big deal, but it's very annoying. moving 30 files 2 at a time is not gonna work for me.
 

bousozoku

Moderator emeritus
Jun 25, 2002
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It sounds as though customisations/hacks are in place. I had an occasional problem with icons changing from 10.3 to 10.3.1 but it was all corrected long ago.

I hope that 10.3.4 will improve the look of OpenGL rendering to where it was at 10.2.8 without the gaps in-between objects. More speed is important, but getting it right is more important.
 

wrldwzrd89

macrumors G5
Jun 6, 2003
12,110
77
Solon, OH
bousozoku said:
It sounds as though customisations/hacks are in place. I had an occasional problem with icons changing from 10.3 to 10.3.1 but it was all corrected long ago.

I hope that 10.3.4 will improve the look of OpenGL rendering to where it was at 10.2.8 without the gaps in-between objects. More speed is important, but getting it right is more important.
Guess what, bousozoku - I have the wrong/garbled/blank icon problem and I have NO customizations/hacks installed currently, nor have I ever installed any. I had the same problem on a PowerBook G4 667 running 10.3.2 (before it died).
 

bousozoku

Moderator emeritus
Jun 25, 2002
15,719
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wrldwzrd89 said:
Guess what, bousozoku - I have the wrong/garbled/blank icon problem and I have NO customizations/hacks installed currently, nor have I ever installed any. I had the same problem on a PowerBook G4 667 running 10.3.2 (before it died).

That is a surprise. It's sad to see how PowerBook owners have been getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop lately, though. Hope Apple sorts it all soon.
 

SilentPanda

Moderator emeritus
Oct 8, 2002
9,992
31
The Bamboo Forest
My only problem with my desktop icons (I don't run any hacks of any sort as they tend to cause more problems than they're worth) is that sometimes the text underneath them seems to have a little bit of a... I don't really know what you'd call it. Selecting the icons (I usually just do select all) and the unselecting them makes it go away for a while but... yeah... not really sure why it's happening... but it really doesn't bring me down too much...
 

idkew

macrumors 68020
SilentPanda said:
My only problem with my desktop icons (I don't run any hacks of any sort as they tend to cause more problems than they're worth) is that sometimes the text underneath them seems to have a little bit of a... I don't really know what you'd call it. Selecting the icons (I usually just do select all) and the unselecting them makes it go away for a while but... yeah... not really sure why it's happening... but it really doesn't bring me down too much...

still get the same in 10.3.3

you can actually take a screen shot of it, which means it is rendering incorrectly in software. i have attached a shot, but it is hard to see with the bg i have.

look for the black line under the text. clicking the icon temporarily removes the line.
 

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bousozoku

Moderator emeritus
Jun 25, 2002
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idkew said:
still get the same in 10.3.3

you can actually take a screen shot of it, which means it is rendering incorrectly in software. i have attached a shot, but it is hard to see with the bg i have.

look for the black line under the text. clicking the icon temporarily removes the line.

That's what I was calling residue, but I haven't seen it since 10.3.3.
 

aswitcher

macrumors 603
Oct 8, 2003
5,338
14
Canberra OZ
"In a seed note, Apple said Version 10.3.4 should provide a performance gain when launching non-prebound applications. In addition, the update includes several changes that may affect device compatibility, specifically, TWAIN scanners, USB Flash Media, SCSI drives, iPods, and some PCMCIA cards."

Does any of this suggest new Apple technology? Possibly a new Ipod rev?
 

bousozoku

Moderator emeritus
Jun 25, 2002
15,719
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aswitcher said:
"In a seed note, Apple said Version 10.3.4 should provide a performance gain when launching non-prebound applications. In addition, the update includes several changes that may affect device compatibility, specifically, TWAIN scanners, USB Flash Media, SCSI drives, iPods, and some PCMCIA cards."

Does any of this suggest new Apple technology? Possibly a new Ipod rev?

I would be pessimistic enough to believe that none of those mentioned devices will work properly after the update, though I would have hope against that feeling.
 

Makosuke

macrumors 604
Aug 15, 2001
6,662
1,242
The Cool Part of CA, USA
The "grapical residue" on the desktop in the image above is a very minor glitch, and I don't think I've seen it since 10.3.3, either.

But that's not the big icon problem; the big problem is with icons that are simply wrong, and they can be anywhere. Usually they're a different icon (for example, all your Quicktime movies will look like PDFs or iTunes will look like a Word doc), other times they'll just be a garbled mess, and occasionally they're just blank.

Whatever the reason, it is completely cosmetic and has no actual ill effects (the documents always open in the correct app), it doesn't seem to happen until your computer has been on for several days, it gets worse with time, and force quitting the Finder will fix everything temporarily (likely it's some sort of cache issue).

I've seen this personally on both G4s and my G5, and I've heard reports of it on a variety of machines, both with and without 3rd party enhancements--it even happens on clean installs.

I've reported it to Apple, and I highly suggest everybody else who's seen it does too--it's definitely real, definitely annoying, and definitely not completely fixed in 10.3.3.
 
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