applescript display dialog with custom icon

Question

Is there a way to use custom icons with applescript display dialog and notifications?

In the AppleScript documentation it says about the display dialog:

with icon (text | integer)
The resource name or ID of the icon to display.

with icon (stop | note | caution) The type of icon to show. You may specify one of the following constants:

• stop (or 0): Shows a stop icon
• note (or 1): Shows the application icon
• caution (or 2): Shows a warning icon, badged with the application icon

with icon (alias | file) An alias or file specifier that specifies a .icns file.

So it seams like you can use your own icons, but I cannot get the following code to work.

display dialog "Text" with icon "/Users/user/Desktop/asd.icns"

It gets me the following error: "Resource not found."

The goal is to not even use a display dialog, but a display notification instead.

Answer 1

You have your path specification wrong. If you have a posix path to your icns file, use the POSIX file class coercion:

display dialog "Text" with icon POSIX file "/Users/user/Desktop/asd.icns"

This coerces the string path into a file reference the system understands, and works just fine.

Answer 2

@DavidT's answer is a perfect solution when your script is controlled by another application. However, things have changed a bit on Mac OS since.

Notably, if you run your script with tell application "MyApp" to display alert ... you will be promoting the user to give your app permissions to control itself, at least starting since Catalina. Not only this annoys the user with a new permission request, but it also looks kinda dumb since the dialogue is asking the user to allow "MyApp" to control "MyApp" and if the user denies it, your script will fail.

To avoid the permission request, just use tell me to display alert ... this will work just fine.

Another issue you might run into is that osascript may throw an exception if your script is launched as root. I found a nice workaround for that here.

This is a small example of how to launch the dialogue with the right user:

uid=determineUserIdFunction(...)
launchctl asuser $uid /usr/bin/osascript <<-EOS
    tell me to display dialog "Now you see me" buttons {"OK"} default button 1 with title "WARNING!"
EOS

Answer 3

Noted this question was three years ago, but I stumbled across this looking for a solution to a similar problem. Mine needs display alert rather than ... notification but the problem is the same because display alert doesn't have a custom icon option.

As noted in the other answer here, AppleScript has at least three interactive message type commands: display dialog, display alert, display notification, and probably others. It seems odd that only the first has the option to add a custom icon. I don't really understand why that is when it would be simple to make them consistent.

Needless to say, this question and @vadian's answer, inspired my solution - a "duh" moment for me once I realized it. It may or may not be a solution to this question. Posting it in case it is...

If the icon in question belongs to an app, you can tell that app to display the notification, regardless of whatever else your script is doing.

Your script can do whatever it needs to do to whatever other apps, or System Events, or itself (if your script is saved as its own application), or whatever else. In the middle of all of that you can have a single line that says:

tell application "MyApp" to display notification ...

The notification will have My App's icon, the result of the notification if any will be returned to the rest of the script and then your script will continue on inside whatever other tell statement or context its in.

If your icon isn't the icon for an app, then I believe there are ways to create an empty app with whatever icon you like, which can behave this way. Admittedly that's a bit of a kludge, but depending on how badly you want this, it's an option - though not one I'll expand on here.

My specific case in detail if interested (but doesn't particularly add to the solution above, just covers how I got there):

I'm writing a script that quits and re-opens another application after confirmation from the user. However, let's say I just wanted to provide a notification as per this question.

Options:

1. display dialog - has the option to provide a custom icon but lacks features of the other two options.

2. display alert - no custom icon but has other desired features, in my case the message parameter which adds extra smaller explanatory text below the primary text.

3. display notification - no custom icon but has other features as desired by this question's poster.

In my case I want alert because I want that extra message parameter (but this works for notification as well).

In my case, ideally the icon of the alert would be the icon of the app I'm restarting, but I can't tell the app itself to display the alert and then restart because the script loses connection with the app when it quits and it kills the running of the script.

If I tell System Events or the script itself to do all that then it can quit and reopen the app independently of the app, but the alert has the generic icon of itself or the System Events icon.

However, if I do what I described above - have my script do all its stuff, but have it tell the app in question to display the alert (and only that as described above), then the alert has the icon of the app in question, but the script still does its stuff independently of the app outside of that alert.

Solved my problem. May or may not solve this question.

Answer 4

First of all you can't display a custom icon with display notification. The reason is that notifications are strongly related to a target application. As AppleScript scripts and applets aren't applications in terms of the Notification framework, the notification is related to the current application, the AppleScript Runner.

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But you can display a custom icon with display dialog

The line

with icon (alias | file) An alias or file specifier that specifies a .icns file.

means what it says: The parameter must be an alias or file specifier rather than a POSIX or HFS string path.

---

Either

display dialog "Text" with icon alias ((path to desktop as text) & "asd.icns")

or

display dialog "Text" with icon file ((path to desktop as text) & "asd.icns")

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path to desktop as text represents the HFS path to the desktop of the current user:

"Macintosh HD:Users:user:Desktop:"