Slight Right

Fixing

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I use a Mac at home, but unfortunately the Mac version of Quicken is absolutely dreadful so I’m relegated to using the Windows version via Parallels which isn’t too much of an inconvenience in itself, but one thing that has irked me lately is that the Quicken icon doesn’t show up properly in the dock when I’m running Parallels. Instead, I get the little ugly icon at the end of my dock here: Ugly Icon

I finally got fed up with it and searched for a solution which I found on the support forums over at Parallels, but I had a tough time running across it so hopefully this post has some more visibility and helps someone else out. Before we start, I actually extracted the “official” Quicken icon from the Windows side of things, but I’m not going to cover that. You can download the icon by clicking here. Follow the steps below and you should be ok.

  1. Install XCode Developer Tools from your OS X DVD. We’ll need the Icon Composer application or you can use any other icon program you’d like, but I don’t have any to recommend at the moment.
  2. Browse to ~/Library/Parallels/(Your Virtual Machine’s Name)/Windows Applications/
  3. You’ll see a “Quicken Launcher” file. Right-click it and choose “Show package contents”
  4. Keep browsing to Contents/Resources and you’ll see a WinAppHelper.icns file. Open it with Icon Composer by right-clicking and choosing “Open With”
  5. Drag whatever icon you want to use for Quicken into the 4 squares on the left. You may receive a warning about a size mismatch, but just choose the option about scaling to match. And if it asks about preserving the alpha mask, say yes. Close and save this file now.
  6. Relaunch Finder. The Parallels thread mentioned restarting multiple times so I tried that, but I doubt you need to. Go to the Apple menu, Force Quit, and choose Finder to relaunch it.
  7. Now, open Quicken again or close it and open it if it was running. Your mileage may vary, but the icon showed up for me at this point. The updated icon now appears in my dock as seen in the the next image. Correct Quicken Icon

I realize this won’t look great if you have your dock set to a very large size. A possible solution would be if someone were to extract the icon from the Mac version of Quicken (which I no longer have), that would provide a real 128×128 icon that looks smooth. For me, the icon at this size looks ok and certainly much better than the previous one.

2 Comments

  1. Thank you so much! It was annoying me too. This was very helpful.

  2. Thanks for this! I was also so annoyed with this. I took it a bit further, in that I found a better quality version of the logo and cut it out and dropped it in to the Icon Composer, I found that I had to drop into each size individually, as the automatic ‘copy to all other sizes’ didn’t work. But now on my dock the icon grows and shrinks beautifully. Here is the png file for anyone else who wants it. Just follow the procedure above, except drag this file into the icon windows. http://www.csulb.edu/~ghosilyk/images/quicken.png

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