Fixed the red icon bars.. here's how

Removed the red icon bars.. here's how

I wonder how many people find the double red bars on all the windows icons and file icons like working in a room with a flashing emergency light operating? Fugly, intrusive, and jarring. I found a way to remove the red bars...

OK it's a tiny bit tedious - not too bad but here's how:

Firstly in coherence turn off Windows application sharing. That removes the icon file directory from your user home directory.

Then shut down the VM and parallels.

Create a folder called parallels_icon_hack somewhere - it doesn't matter where it is or what you call it

Then in finder navigate to the os x applications directory (/Applications) and Show the parallels.app package contents and navigate to Contents->Resources

There are three files you should copy to your parallels_icon_hack directory:
SharedAppIconMask_128.png
SharedAppIconMask.icns
SharedAppIconOverlay.icns

Now make ANOTHER copy of these files in your parallels_icon_hack directory and re-name the {name}-old.extension, e.g.
SharedAppIconMask_128-old.png
SharedAppIconMask-old.icns
SharedAppIconOverlay-old.icns

You will need these for backup.

Now, Edit the non-old files one at a time. I used photoshop - you might use Gimp, whatever. For the icns files you will need icon composer which comes with the development pack. it's in /Developer/Applications/Utilities/IconComposer.app

Here's what you need to know:

SharedAppIconMask_128.png

You can edit this directly in PS or Gimp. It has black bars which are a mask. Just make the whole thing white and save it back. (that's why we made copies called *-old so that we still had the originals if needed)

SharedAppIconMask.icns

These icons are a litte trickier. The images tab of icon composer has a colourful mac strip with two white bars. Copy that to a window in your image editor, you will need it later (just click on the image in the icon composer window and cmd C or Edit copy.

Then switch to the mask tab (a black field with clear bars) and copy that image to another window in your image editor.

In the mask (black) image, paint the two clear bars black. Then paste that back into the icon composer mask window. That will turn the image window black too and you don't want that. So back to the image editor to the coloured image and fill in the blank bars (I used an area copy/paste and it worked fine but you could use the stamp tool too). The when you have filled in the bars, copy and paste that back to icon composer in the image window.

Now save the icns file back where you got it.

SharedAppIconOverlay.icns

Do the same here, remove the bars and the mask.

Now copy the png and two icns files back to the Contents/Resources directory in the Parallels.app file (you can copy the backups too: good place to stash them) - over-writing when prompted.

Now start parallels, get the windows mouse wheel spinning, and re-enable windows application sharing. This will re-build the apps folder in the dock. Pop the dock folder and you'll see none of the icons have red bars

Now one last thing. This is where it gets a little tedious. Go to your /Users/{youraccount}/Applications folder. IN there you will find the icons for your windows apps. They may be all wrong (they may not, if not, happy days).

More than likely they will be generic document icons. So now open another finder window from the windows folder in the dock. They will have nice icons. You can chose the apps you care about and amend the icons my just dragging the icons from the dock apps folder files (in get info) to the corresponding /Users/{youraccount}/Applications file. It took me about 15-20 mins to reset all my icons and it worked a treat.

I now have a 'red pause logo' free icon set on both the dock and in windows...

Oh, one other thing: if you update parallels you need to put the files back. So keep a backup of the icon files in the relevant /Users/{youraccount}/Applications directory AND make sure you reset those three files in the application container after the update and before you start the VM.


Ciao, RJ