Pixelated icons and other XP ugliness.

J

johnoyler

Member
As a web developer, my main (and mostly only) use for Parallels is for Internet Explorer. The latest beta and coherence makes this very nice to use.

So I went into

~/Library/Parallels/[VM name here]/Windows Applications/Internet Explorer.app/Contents/Resources

and opened WinAppHelper.icns with Icon Composer. I then pasted the PNG I found here:

http://www.xiaprojects.com/www/prodotti/kxdocker/xmls/icons/iexplorer.png

Into it, making sure to scale it down to each smaller size in turn. A reboot later, I can see the new and impoved icon in Finder, but on the dock it still looks like crap. Where else do I have to change this? Can it be changed?

(And does anyone know where to find a good 128x128 IE7 with 8bit alpha?)

Another issue. I hadn't really used Windows since win2k. Back then it was only mildy annoying most of the time. Setting the taskbar to auto-hide mostly kept the thing hidden. Now, the thing spends the first 5 minutes reminding me of how stupid I am, and pointing out all sorts of useful things with balloon windows, such as I have icons that are no longer useful on my desktop, a desktop which I thankfully don't have to see and could not care less about.

Does anyone know how to disable the taskbar completely, forever and ever, and by this I mean bury it so deeply that it would prefer to sink back into the hell from which it was spawned rather than claw its way back up to me every time I alt-tab past the Parallels VM? I'm assuming it's some registry hack, or even worse voodoo. I am prepared to sacrifice animals if needed.

Finally, are there any plans for "Parallel Tools" for Xorg?
 
View > Customize
Coherence Tab
uncheck Show

Have fun :)

I'm playing with editing the .app application launchers now... As someone else has mentioned, the only thing you can't seem to do is include program arguments (which blows.) You can link to shortcuts, but it causes two items to appear in the application switcher/dock (one for the shortcut file that was launched from OS X, and one for the application that the shortcut in windows, in turn, launches.) I tried editing that .icns file as well, but didnt bother to try rebooting to see it. I'll have to try that.
 
Also...

I keep hoping the Parallels guys will at some point be able to intercept the win32 calls in the VM and crop out only the client area of any particular window. They'd pop this into a proper Cocoa window with non-ugly min/max/close buttons, and give the thing a real menu up at the top, that proxied for the hidden win32 menu.

Of course, on a real operating system like linux, this is already almost possible... running X without a window manager, and just a single application does most of this (except the menu part).
 
Hah. Somehow, even with the taskbar turned off in the way you described, the thing has returned. I closed my last IE window, and it popped back up and refuses to leave. Damn you Redmond, damn you.
 
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