Give us a hint Parallels Team...

Give us a hint Parallels Team... For Christmas!

Editing the helper launch applications is easy enough, changing the icons is easy enough... But you can't specify arguments! This makes it impossible to launch, for example, explorer to a specific folder.

You can change the helper .app to point to a windows shortcut (.lnk file,) but this results in two icons appearing in the application switcher/dock (one for the helper app being launched, one for the application started by the windows shortcut.)

When you try to include an argument to the "APP Path" property you get an error from Parallels Tools in windows that it wasn't found. I've tested using quotes, no quotes, hyphenation for arguments etc and can't find a way. I've tried to see if you created a similarly named "APP Args" or the like (APP Args, APP Arg, APP Arguments, APP Argument, Args, Arg, Arguments, Argument) to no avail...

Is there some way to include arguments? This would solve all of my needs for the OS X application launching.

EDIT

Make it our Christmas present

 

Not to change the subject, but how do you change icons? I can't successfully change them so that they show up differently in the dock...

 

Open the WinAppHelper.icns file in the build-in utility Icon Composer.
Drag a new icon (I tested with a PNG) to replace the existing one in Icon Composer. Save.

Next time you launch it, it will show the correct icon (in the application switcher. It doesnt seem to effect the dock..)

 

I'm not seeing it in either dock or application switcher. Thanks though.

 

It has worked for me a few times (didnt even need a restart of parallels or anything.) Although, it was done on an application I duplicated and modified.

 

See...

I've been modifying the windows app that Parallels creates directly, rather than doing it to a copy.

But no love on the icon change.

 

I've been playing with it a lot last night. I can change the icons with the ones parallels creates directly. My method is as follows:

(So far I've grabbed Icons from OS X apps that I also use in Windows, just to get easy access to the Icons.) For Eclipse:

Look inside the OS X Eclipse.app bundle, grab the .icns file and copy it somewhere. Open the .icns file in Preview, Save as > PNG (You need to do this because the .icns file has some different formatting then the PNG file. If you simply rename the .icns file .png Photoshop is unable to read it.)

I then took one of the Parallels Overlay .icns file (converted to PNG similarly) from the Parallels.app bundle, and then made my own image using the two to put a little parallels icon overlay over eclipse, with some shadowing etc. Save as PNG in Photoshop to "Eclipse Final.png"

Now go into my aptly named "Win Eclipse.app" bundle that parallels created (You CAN rename those .app files,) find the WinAppHelper.icns file, right click, open with > Icon Composer (this utility is included with the Apple Developer tools...) It should display the currently used ugly scaled icon, now you can just find the file in finder "Eclipse Final.png" and drag it right over the existing, and then save.

Now I finally figured out how to get it to showup properly... I was rebooting OS X each time. That isn't necessary. In order for Finder to recognize the icon change of the .app, finder needs to be re-launched. I don't know of any proper way to do this, but I have a shell script I use to show/hide hidden files in finder, which in turn restarts finder. If you have a way of restarting finder, it should do the trick of making the right icon appear.

 

You can quit/relaunch Finder using the Apple Menu/Force Quit item. Highlight Finder in the list of applications and click the Relaunch button.