To distinguish your product for the user, you should design your own icons for all the files associated with your application. Your application can then use another resource, called a bundle resource , to assign these icons to all your files of a particular type. For example, the document icon representing Some Memo in Figure 7-1 is the icon that the SurfWriter application assigns to all text files that it creates. When double-clicking the icon for Some Memo, the user asks the Finder to launch the SurfWriter application, which in turn responds by opening the document Some Memo in a window. Stationery pads are files that a user creates to serve as templates for other documents.
Editions are special files that contain data to be shared among applications.
Query documents contain commands and data in a format appropriate for a database or other data source. If your application supports any of these document types, you can create icons for the Finder that distinguish the stationery pads, editions, and query documents that users create with your application. For example, Plate 4 at the front of this book shows customized stationery pad and edition icons used for documents created with the SurfWriter application. You might also like your application to create customized icons for documents on the desktop. Macintosh users have access to online assistance in the form of help balloons.