[MACTCL] IconServices and tkMacOSXBitmap.c

[Kevin W. <kw...@co...>]

I'm revisiting an earlier interest in getting Tk to display Mac-native 
icons under Aqua. Tk had this capability under Classic, but it is 
currently broken. My current method to display Mac-native icons is to 
use an external command-line tool to retrieve the icon, then convert it 
to a PNG via the sips tool. I would prefer to have a method to get icon 
data in the same manner as other Carbon applications, via IconServices; 
given a file path, Carbon would display the correct icon/image data in Tk.

Because I'm not an expert with C, my question is whether this could be 
accomplished by patching tkMacOSXBitmap.c, or whether I would need to 
delve much deeper into defining a new image format or doing some 
conversion of icon data at the C level to display in Tk. Looking at 
tkMacOSXBitmap.c, it appears to make at least some use of IconServices 
(the function "GetIcon" is defined in IconServices). However, it focuses 
mainly on old-style resource files (and uses QuickDraw calls--aren't 
these deprecated?). The modern API for obtaining icon data is GetIconRef 
and related functions. Is there any way to add this API to the 
tkMacOSXBitmap.c file?

The alternative approach I've envisioned involves creating a new image 
format for Tk that could read data from GetIconRef, or alternatively, 
doing some conversion of IconRef to a bitmap format that Tk can 
recognize, via CoreGraphics or CoreImage. But creating a new image 
format for Tk is out of my depth, and I have not found any method to 
convert IconRef's into a standard image format, at least in Carbon. 
(There are some methods that go the other way, i.e. convert a PNG to an 
IconRef or something similar.)

Any advice is appreciated.
-- 
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com