Icons

Chatter allows you to send icons during a conversation.  I felt this adds a little more depth to conversing over a network.  A popup menu of 30 icons is in the lower right hand corner of each window.  These icons are read from the Chatter Icons file in the Chatter Preferences folder in your System Folder.  The reason these icons are external is that I figured you might want to add your own icons, or might want to be able to access  different sets of icons. ( I know I would !). 

Creating an icon file:

Probably the easiest way to do this is just to make a copy of the Chatter Icons file and rename it something else. You'll be able to edit it with a resource editor like ResEdit.  Chatter will create a new Chatter Icons file when it can’t find the old one.  

When editing the resource file, keep the following in mind:
1) Chatter is hard coded to look for  resource IDs between 600 and 629. Icons with resource IDs outside this range won't be displayed. This is something I’ll try to make more flexible in the future, if there is a demand for it.

2) The resource types have to be ‘icl8’, ‘icl4’, and ‘ICN#’, as Chatter uses them to draw the icon in 256 colors, 16 colors, and black & white, respectively.  If the file just consists of ‘icl8’ resources, anybody using a 16 color or black and white monitor will see nothing.

3) I recomend solid masks for the icons, as this makes them hilight better when they are selected from the popup menu.

Once you have created another icon file, you can use:

Use Icon File...
under the File menu to use it.