Retina display, this ain't: the Susan Kare memorial display mode.
June 18, 2011 8:31 PM   Subscribe

Fuzzy icons in OS X 10.6? It started with the Chrome icon: using command-tab to switch apps, I noticed that the finder seemed to be showing a blown-up version of the 32x32 px icon rather than the resolution independent one. Same goes for the dock.

Now I notice that a couple of others are having display issues as well -- Sophos Anti-Virus (and its uninstall utility), the Airport Utility, TrueCrypt (I think, maybe that one was a bit blurry to begin with), and the Epson Settings Manager have all been bitten. I suppose they all happened at the same time, but Chrome is the only one I'd notice right off, so I can't be sure of that. Restarts, relaunching the finder, trashing finder prefs, don't work. Googling turns up some discussion of the issue affecting other Snow Leopard users, but no definitive fixes I can find. Hopefully, there's an easy fix and someone here has come across it.

Further: OS X 10.6.7, Current MacBook Pro 13". Here are some shots of the icons: 1, 2. System seems stable and unaffected otherwise -- this is purely cosmetic.
posted by sherman to Computers & Internet (6 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: you'll need to trash your icon cache files. cocktail does this from the "files" tab. (you can also handle it via terminal, but i'm not sure what the command actually is.)
posted by patricking at 8:50 PM on June 18, 2011


Best answer: Have you tried tossing out your icon cache files? This is a discussion on the apple forums on a related issue.
posted by jessamyn at 8:55 PM on June 18, 2011


Response by poster: Aha, icon cache files. That one did the trick. I just searched for them using the method described in jessamyn's link, but cocktail probably works too. All is fine after a restart. Also, apparently TrueCrypt's icon is just bad and blurry. I can live with that.
posted by sherman at 9:14 PM on June 18, 2011


Windows can suffer from the same thing for the same reason.
posted by flabdablet at 10:38 PM on June 18, 2011


sort of a sidebar: it is technically possible for icons to actually use the 32x32 resource for a larger size. mac icons have a handful of resources ranging from 512x512 down to 8x8, and they're literally separate graphics. if the designer doesn't actually use the right sized resource, another one would be used as the next best thing.

J's link is better than mine if this is all you're doing -- i do like cocktail as a catch-all maintenance tool for this sort of thing though. it's a collection of cleanup tasks you use so rarely (but of course, only when you absolutely need them) that you're prone to forgetting what their fix is.
posted by patricking at 8:54 AM on June 19, 2011


hey, just found a freeware thinger that does the same thing. see here.
posted by patricking at 3:19 PM on June 20, 2011


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