Menu Bar Apple Logo file location?

[bschmidt43]

I've done this before but it was years ago and the OS has changed drastically, but I'm wanting to replace the black Apple logo in the top left corner in the menu bar with the classic rainbow Apple logo. Does anyone know where that .png file's location is nowadays?

And on that note, if anyone might know of a good quality rainbow logo .png that I could replace it with then that would be much appreciated.

 

[960design]

Did not know this was possible... eagerly watching for some 'hacky' sweetness

 

[bschmidt43]

Did not know this was possible... eagerly watching for some 'hacky' sweetness

Yeah I used to do it back in the Snow Leopard days but the file location has since changed. All you have to do is replace the file with another .png and it’ll change it.

 

[960design]

Could it be here?
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/LoginUIKit.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LoginUICore.framework/Versions/A/Resources

You have to disable SIP, but it may work.

 

[bschmidt43]

Could it be here?
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/LoginUIKit.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LoginUICore.framework/Versions/A/Resources

You have to disable SIP, but it may work.

Thats where I had originally checked but I didn't see it. Only Apple logos related to the boot up it seems.

 

[960design]

Thats where I had originally checked but I didn't see it. Only Apple logos related to the boot up it seems.

Ahhh... I'll keep looking.

 

[organicCPU]

Ahhh... I'll keep looking.

Could it be an  from the Apple Symbols font and no more a graphics file like png or icns?

 

[Kornelis]

You can find it in /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemAppearance.bundle/Contents/Resources/ in a resource file called Assets.car. You need a special program to be able to edit it, that can be downloaded from here:
https://github.com/alexzielenski/ThemeEngine

You must disable SIP if you want to replace it with a changed file. It is not easy to make changes to the appearance of the UI and if not done correctly it can mean that you have to reinstall the OS. There are some people on this forum busy with UI-customising, see here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/aqua-lick-1-0beta.2091964/page-4

To difficult for me, so my solution was to let GeekTool display a png over the default Apple logo. GeekTool randomly chooses one from a folder, so besides the classic rainbow Apple logo I have several more like the red-white-blue one I have as avatar. The only disadvantage is that it always stays on top, so when I go in full screen mode the logo is still visible in the top left corner. It is not a big problem because I don't use full screen mode that often on my iMac.

 

[fisherking]

i've modified assets.car files in the past; definitely, as kornelis points out, proceed with caution (and decide if it's really worth it); you may find yourself restoring the OS.

apple does not make it easy, they obviously really don't want you to change these things (i miss the old days of theming, and theming apps)...

 

[organicCPU]

Fascinating, never heard of car files before. However, I downloaded the latest release of ThemeEngine, opened a copy of Assets.car and edited the element 'Apple'. Everything looked fine and colorful with the old Apple Logo until I saved the car file. Unfortunately reopening brought back greyscale converted images in the Apple element. Any suggestions?

 

[fisherking]

somewhere, there's a cached file, it's overwriting what you've done. did you disable SIP before you did this? and you sure your changes were saved? i seem to remember having issues with themeEngine and saving...

 

[Kornelis]

Interesting. But the strange thing is that it is a black and white version of the rainbow logo. Maybe only B&W is allowed for that element.

 

[organicCPU]

did you disable SIP before you did this? and you sure your changes were saved?

That wasn't applied to the system, yet. What you see is the modified Apple element (don't know if this is used for the Apple menu icon, but I guess that could be the right one). The original image was a plain black  before, then the colored one was applied (tried with ThemeEngine send/receive menu and by Drag'n'Drop RGBA png files). The file then was saved in a test folder outside of any SIP affected region and reopened in ThemeEngine. That didn't came up with the original black icon, but the former colored one converted to greyscale. If it's a bug while writing the car file, I don't know.

Maybe only B&W is allowed for that element.

That was my first thought. I had no luck in finding a setting in ThemeEngine. A hex editor nor actool don't seem to be suitable tools of choice for this task either. Thought that there could exist a well known trick to get grayscale elements exchanged by colored ones, as there are some colored elements in the assets.car file.

 

[NordicBoots]

Did you find a solution?
Cheers!

 

[organicCPU]

Did you find a solution?

Didn't try anymore recently. Last time I did, I couldn't find out how to color monochrome assets.

 

[NordicBoots]

Thanks for your reply.
I guess only greyscale is allowed for that element.
But I'll elaborate a little bit more...

 

[NordicBoots]

I started to think that it has to do with a limitation in terms of file size: 4 and 8 kB respectively.
What do you think?

 

[organicCPU]

Hi @NordicBoots! I guess file size restrictions are unlikely, but who knows...?

My guess is, that ThemeEngine just can't handle the proprietary file format well enough. If you analyze the contents of the original Assets.car (left side of image) in Terminal like this:

assetutil -I /path/to/Assets.car > ~/Desktop/Assets_assetutil_breakdown.txt

...and then repeat it on the modified .car file (right side of image), you'll see differences on comparison.

Something like this happens on modification through ThemeEngine:


Maybe I'm simply using ThemeEngine the wrong way or I need to create the PNG file differently, but for me ThemeEngine adds some "ColorModel" : "Monochrome" and "Encoding" : "Gray" flags without any reason, so far.

It could be that other tools will work better for decompiling and recompiling Asset.car files.
At least here is some more info on analyzing Assets.car files and some more info on Asset Catalogs (should be the uncompiled base for Assets.car files). Hope that helps for your further investigation.

 

[NordicBoots]

That is awkward!
I know from my Logic Pro X modding experience that Photoshop does strange things with (definition of) images, while Graphic Converter doesn't. But also using Graphic Converter doesn't modify the Apple icon the right way.

 

[NordicBoots]

After a couple of different trials, I created an icon for the menu bar, which is based on a rather famous Apple logo; although it's hard to see.
Thanks to Princess Cake and allan.nyholm for their efforts making this possible.
You can download the items, which you can easily drop on the corresponding items within element Apple:

Free File Hosting - Online Storage; Upload Mp3, Videos, Music. Backup Files

 

[NordicBoots]

I kind of re-discovered a utility called "Classic Menu", which does the trick. I'm not sure how they do it.
Anyway, I managed to modify that tiny nasty logo within the app.
What are your thoughts?

 

[organicCPU]

What are your thoughts?

Provided that you are not talking about a famous fast food restaurant's "Classic Menu" , but about this:

Classic Menu - Apple Menu for Mac OS X - File Launcher

Indeed, it seems to give us back the rainbow apple. However, IMHO the app is a bit overkill just to modify the appearance of the Apple logo. From reading a bit in the source code, it has nothing to do with simply swapping some Assets.car graphics, but it is working as a Menu Bar image overlay instead. Classic Menu is a complete app that not only changes the logo's appearance, but also the original behavior of the Apple Menu, providing a shortcut for the initial Apple Menu functionality.

Well, so far so good. If you try to compile it from the sources, it fails on a modern macOS' Xcode and would need some rework. Originally written for Mac OS X 10.5.x, I wouldn't suggest to run it as an unmodified precompiled app on any recent macOS as an everyday permanently launched app. I guess a 64-bit app version for macOS Catalina would even need some more modifications. Nonetheless, interesting find that makes the sources available under MIT license. Maybe someone revives the project.

 

[NordicBoots]

I guess you're right. I didn't dive into the source, because I more or less like the classic-style menu to some extend.
Maybe we have to rely on GeekTool again, which provides also an overlay... but no overhead.

 

[allan.nyholm]

Just found this thread and it got me curious too. I appreciate the read.

 

[NordicBoots]

Nice to meet you here, Allan.
What are your thoughts about this?