Missing Icons In Applications Stack on Dock...

The other day I installed the game "World of Goo" on my MBP and a weird thing happened. The game showed up in the Applications stack on the dock, but the icon was missing. Instead it had a grayed out "default" type icon with a circle with a cross over the it. However, if I viewed my applications in a Finder window the icon showed up just fine there.

I did a quick google search and found a blog post by somebody who had the same type of issue (though not for World of Goo) and he/she solved it by opening up Terminal and typing "kill Dock" This of course killed the dock process, and it automatically restarts and the icon is suddenly there.

I can't remember the date on that blog posting, and I'd have to find it again, but I'm just wondering if others have this happen, and if this is something that happens often for anybody who has gone through it. I thought maybe it was a Snow Leopard issue, and the game maybe not being fully tested and supported for SL, but I'm just guessing. I don't know for sure, since I don't know when the game came out, if the latest version officially supports SL, etc. The blogger I had found said that they had to do it a lot, after installing programs. I've only had my MBP for a couple months and this was the first time this has happened, but World of Goo was maybe my 3rd or 4th software installation.

Yeah, I believe this is an issue with the icon preview cache. A preview of the icon is cached for quicker access at some increment and I think when you install something it just takes a while before it gets cached. This is something I've experienced from way back in OSX, even this post from 2004 has the same sort of issue: http://nslog.com/2004/04/21/icon_cache

Don't know of a real solution other than waiting for it to cache.

Interesting. Perhaps if this happens again I'll leave it alone and see how long it takes to show up.

try dragging the grayed out icon to the desktop then dragging it back into the applications folder.

I installed World of Goo and nothing happened (15" MBP with Snow Leopard). It sounds like some issue with the dock though, not the application itself. It's plays fine, huh?

Travolta said:

try dragging the grayed out icon to the desktop then dragging it back into the applications folder.

Click to expand...

There's a couple applications I'll probably be installing in the next week or two, so maybe I'll try that as well, just to test it out. I ended up doing "kill Dock" in Terminal with World of Goo, after I had read the blog posting suggesting that method, and that had fixed the problem.

caleb2001r said:

I installed World of Goo and nothing happened (15" MBP with Snow Leopard). It sounds like some issue with the dock though, not the application itself. It's plays fine, huh?

Click to expand...

Yup, the game plays just fine for me. My only issue was that icon not showing up, but killing the dock corrected it. Even before fixing the icon though, I had no problems launching and playing the game.