Known Bugs

Yeah, hide these at the end of a really long document. That way people will think there are no bugs in the product. There are a few bugs that we know about. For those of you with the fortitude to make it this far, here they are:

• If you are running Aaron or one of the other extensions that beautifies your desktop in System 7, you'll see a 2D folder rather than a 3D folder. That's because the icon comes from the Finder and the Finder doesn't know it's being extended. The correct icon will appear on the desktop.

• Sometimes the Finder and IconDropper don't communicate about the dropped item—after you drop nothing happens. We haven't been able to nail this bug because it is so unpredictable. The workaround is to drop again, there are no other nasty side effects to this bug. The bug has not been seen in MacOS 8.

• The background on the right-hand side of the IconPacker interface sometimes covers up the resize control. The control works OK, it just doesn't look right. Sorry.

• Considering the amount of time the program's author has spent abroad, it is strange that neither IconDropper or IconPacker are easily localised. The primary reason is that the main interface requires very little text, so native language support is not really needed. Another reason is that the instructions are simple and anybody who is going to be getting the application off the Internet is going to be at least a little familiar with its lingua franca. In my travels, I've found that saying something slowly and clearly is much more effective than saying it badly in a native tongue. If there is a need for foreign versions of the applications, I'll be needing people to translate. Contact craigh@kagi.com if you would be interested in translating to your native language.


We would like to know if you find something wrong with IconDropper or IconPacker. If you encounter a problem, you can send e-mail to the Iconfactory (icndropper@aol.com). We will be posting Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on the Iconfactory web site. If there's a serious bug, we'll fix it and issue an update. If it's a cockpit error, we'll update the FAQ.


To Do

This was the part of the document where we kept track of things to do. The current version has all the major features we needed for a release. The following items are things that we could do in a future version:

• Automatically resize the window to the maximum size of the pack. This could be really useful, but the idea came up too late in the development cycle. Oh well.

• Allow IconDropper setup while you are applying icons. The foreman has been asking for this since the early days of the program's development. It requires some major changes to the IconDropper state machine, so it was not included in this version.

• Multiple selection of icons in IconPacker. Yes, it would be nice to move around more than one icon at a time. Most of the beta testers caught us on this one. Have patience .. we will fix this in the future.


If there's something else that you really want these applications to do, please send us some e-mail. If you tell us why and how you'd use the feature, we're more likely to be interested in it. If you're a registered user, we want to keep you happy.