Desktop Change the menu bar battery icon?

[HarmfulHippo]

Hello,

I'm really fed up of the somewhat 'boring' appearance of my menu bar. I've been searching for days for some customised icons or even a way to customise them myself, and found one site with coloured icons! However the link had 'expired' and my dreams were crushed.
Ideally, the icon would look awesome with green at full battery, orange whilst charging, and red when low.
Please advise,

Jack

 

[cambookpro]

Just done a bit of digging inside the System files. (I assume you're talking about changing the battery indicator of OS X?)

Anyway, all the resources for the batter meter are located at System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/Battery.menu/Contents/Resources.

From here, the files you'll want to be changing are battery empty, BatterLevelCapB-L etc.

Make a backup first, and repair permissions after!

From what I can see, the battery icon is made up of four parts: the battery itself, one curved line on the left, straight lines in the middle, and a curved line on the right.

Do do your red/green/orange idea, you'd have to change the colour of those to green, then the 'charging' icons in that folder to orange.

Good luck.

 

[HarmfulHippo]

Tried it

One step ahead of ya, I'd already tried it but I'm far from a professional icon editor. They were in PDF form, so I converted them to JPG using Preview, and edited the colours using a free image editor. My pictures (as you can see in the picture) are pixelated and just non-professional. I then converted them back to PDF, replaced the files and it looked awful! (I replaced the failed coloured versions with the originals just before writing this post). How can I make my images smoother?
Thank you for the reply

 

[cambookpro]

One step ahead of ya, I'd already tried it but I'm far from a professional icon editor. They were in PDF form, so I converted them to JPG using Preview, and edited the colours using a free image editor. My pictures (as you can see in the picture) are pixelated and just non-professional. I then converted them back to PDF, replaced the files and it looked awful! (I replaced the failed coloured versions with the originals just before writing this post). How can I make my images smoother?
Thank you for the reply

Can you post an screenshot of them in the menubar?

Just to get an idea of what needs to be done.

Thanks

 

[HarmfulHippo]

here

It totally doesn't work now the colour doesn't show, and there is an unwanted white box surrounding it.

 

[HarmfulHippo]

Here, this should be orange with no white outline

 

[HarmfulHippo]

Can you post an screenshot of them in the menubar?

Just to get an idea of what needs to be done.

Thanks

It totally doesn't work now the colour doesn't show, and there is an unwanted white box surrounding it.

edit: this is my first day on the site so i'm not too good at it yet, the image can be seen above

 

[cambookpro]

I'll have a look today and see what I can do.

 

[HarmfulHippo]

I'll have a look today and see what I can do.

Thanks, you're a legend.

 

[cambookpro]

Thanks, you're a legend.

Try this as a quick test. No idea if it will work but all the lines etc are as clean as possible.

If it works, I'll do the other bits for you if you want

 

[HarmfulHippo]

Try this as a quick test. No idea if it will work but all the lines etc are as clean as possible.

If it works, I'll do the other bits for you if you want

It certainly is a lot smoother! Seems to only work on the login screen. Once logged in I get this:

(I'll include a comparison of original battery with yours)

 

[cambookpro]

It certainly is a lot smoother! Seems to only work on the login screen. Once logged in I get this:

(I'll include a comparison of original battery with yours)

Hmm I'll have look at that later on. Not quite sure why it's only doing it on the login screen!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk 2

 

[HarmfulHippo]

Hmm I'll have look at that later on. Not quite sure why it's only doing it on the login screen!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk 2

I made some iChat icons, they don't work though there must be something we have to change in the resources folder.

 

[cambookpro]

I made some iChat icons, they don't work though there must be something we have to change in the resources folder.

Have you restarted? I'm pretty sure these only take effect once you've restarted.

 

[HarmfulHippo]

Have you restarted? I'm pretty sure these only take effect once you've restarted.

Multiple times. I found a menulet called SlimBatteryMonitor, it's exactly what I was looking for but has no horizontal battery.

 

[cambookpro]

Multiple times. I found a menulet called SlimBatteryMonitor, it's exactly what I was looking for but has no horizontal battery.

Ok, well glad you've got what you're looking for. I'm still not sure why your icons didn't work, though!

 

[traumuhhtize]

iStat Menus will let you have the different colored batteries. It'll go from green to orange then to red and vice versa when it's charging.