Questions and Answers
By David A. Lyons
Copyright (c) 1992 Apple Users' Group, Sydney
Republished from Applecations, a publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia.
Apple II System Software Engineer
Apple Computer, Inc.
Source: Internet
Q: I have a couple of folders that are a coloured picture on a white background, which the finder refuses to color yellow. If the default colour was left at yellow and I created a new folder named "Games" (for which I have a special icon) it would come up white. Any other folder icon I have would get tinted yellow... I can't figure out what is special about the ones it won't touch.
A: Every icon has an "already colored" flag that you can set with DIcEd or Icon Ed. In DIcEd it can be found under Edit Attributes... When the box is checked, the system never applies recolouring to the icon. The System folder icon is marked that way. If you have any custom folder icons that already contain colour, set the checkbox for those icons, and they won't get uglified with yellow.
Q: Why does System 6.0 not allow you to Trash the boot disk's icon in the Finder?
A: To keep the desktop visually consistent with GS/OS's idea of what volumes are available, Finder 6.0 doesn't let you get rid of an icon for a disk that has open files on it. (If it did let you get rid of the icon, the user could get confused when they inserted a different disk with the same name and were told it was a duplicate, because GS/OS was keeping information about the old disk, even though there was no icon for it.)
Dragging the disk to the trash should still *eject* the disk, but its icon won't go away. The open files on your boot disk are Sys.Resources, Finder data fork, and Finder resource fork. There maybe more.
Q: What files can or should go in the finder extensions folder?
A: Anything that the Finder labels as "Finder extension" can go there (there is a special file type), plus any Permanent Init that the author *tells you* can go there. In general, it's -not- safe to put any old PIF into the FinderExtras folder.
Q: Is there some way to stop the accessory icons appearing when I load GS/OS?
A: The ability to not show the icons is in 6.0, there just isn't any human interface for it. Set bit 1 of Battery RAM location $5F, and ShowBootInfo will keep its grubby hands off of your boot screen.
Q: I have noticed some slightly odd behaviour with System 6's disk insertion handling, in relation to my SyQuest removable hard drive.
The first oddity was with a "disk insertion" dialog in Finder - asking for a floppy disk to be inserted. At this point, I pushed the eject button on the SyQuest drive. For some reason, the system thought I had just _inserted_ a disk, as the disk insertion dialog went away. After a drive scan, it came back again, asking for the floppy disk again.
A: What's happening is ScanDevices calls a GS/OS DO_INSERT_SCAN vector, which polls all removable block devices watching for a
disk-switched status. When it finds a device reporting disk-switched, it checks whether the device is online or offline. If it's online, then you've got an insert!
Unless the driver doesn't switch to reporting offline right away, like until the eject is complete. There wasn't anything particularly obvious to do to the SCSI drivers to fix that (since much of the info is coming from the device without interpretation), so we chose to live with it... it's just annoying, not harmful.

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