IconPatcher is a small program designed to easily let you replace a program's icon on the Extras bar. The program icon is the one that shows in your Extras bar (and possibly elsewhere in your System folders depending on what the program is). The main reson for doing this is probably for replacing older (or no-longer maintained) greyscale icons/applications with a colour one - mainly so that they'll look prettier on a colour ER5 machine such as a Series 7, netBook, or netPad. However the program will work equally well on a monchrome ER5 machine such as a 5mx, revo, etc.

The program icon is the one that shows in your Extras bar (and possibly elsewhere in your System folders depending on what the program is). I've already described - both on my own website (www.pscience5.net) and FoxPop (www.foxpop.co.uk) - how to do this manually but IconPatcher has a number of advantages over doing it this way:-

• You don't need to use a hex-editor program such as FileDump to manually extract program UIDs.

• You don't need to use a graphics program such as MBMView or OneMBM to combine single-image MBM into a multiple-image MBM.

• You don't need to use a graphics program such as MBMView or OneMBM to combine single-image MBM into a multiple-image MBM. Equally, you don't need one of these programs in order to extract images from original .aif files for editing. All you need is IconPatcher and the built-in Sketch program in order to extract from, edit, and recreate .aif files...

• You can view original .aif files before doing anything.

• IconPatcher will correctly preserve the UID and also all captions, capabilities flags (eg. hide from Extras, New File), and MIME information from the old icon - which the manual method won't (easily) do.

• You can equally well use other icons (i.e. .aif files) as the source for the replacement icon you want to generate. This means that you can swap icons around from one program to another if you want to!

What it can't do...

How do I use it?

Full instructions are included with the program - both as a ReadMe.txt file and as the built-in 'Help'.

Compatibility:

IconPatcher has been designed to work on the Psion Series 7, netBook, and netPad initially. It will also work on other ER5 machines - e.g. 5mc, MC218, etc. - albeit in greyscale only It should also work on a revo - although the dialog box may be slightly too large for this machine.

Acknowledgements:

The 'core' for this program was written by Andrew Gregory (andrew@scsoftware.com.au) and the source supplied as-is for further development/publication. Visit Andrew's website at http://www.scsoftware.com.au/family/andrew/ to find some of his other software.

I am indebted to him for doing this as I simply would not have had the time nor the inclination otherwise! All I have done is wrapped a UI around it and written some explanation.