CompuServe Messages

Steve – Okay, in 25 words or more…. 🙂 * Resorcerer [RR] is a supported product; ResEdit is just barely a "product" that would have either failed or gotten a lot better a long time ago had Apple been selling it for what a good resource editor is worth to Macintosh developers. Too late now, though 🙂 * RR costs real money; ResEdit is free (you get what you pay for). Resorcerer has a more productive interface, many more powerful tools and features, and can edit lots more important Apple resources than ResEdit can. * RR is a completely vanilla Mac application that makes no patches, and does not rely on any Resource Manager data structures to edit resources. It does not edit resources internally; all operation is RAM-based. All this means that it is more robust than ResEdit, and hasn't the history of trashing the files it edits during crashes that ResEdit has. * RR lets you browse all the resources in one window. * RR supports a simple Rez-like text script language for building resource files from other files; it parses simple C header files, and can be used to create conditional project file builds. It is not a full resource compiler. * RR lets you search resource files for text. Each editor supports text searching and highlighting as well. For instance, you can search and open every dialog or alert with a "Continue" button in it. ResEdit can't. * RR can compare two resource files and mark resources that are different in some way. It doesn't tell you where the different bytes are. The interface for this is nice, since RR can mark resources easily. * RR can make global changes to groups of resources, such as ensuring that an attribute is set or clear for all resources in a file. It can change resource types as easily as resource IDs. * RR edits the data fork of a file as if it were of pseudo-resource. * RR has a visible, accumulating clipboard. You can change resource IDs of resources while they are in the resource scrap; cut and paste groups of resources at once (e.g. select a 'DLOG', and 'DLOG', 'DITL', 'dctb', 'ictb' all get put in the scrap). * All lists in Resorcerer are implemented with its own 32-bit List Manager, so there are no problems other than lack of memory for really large lists, which happen all the time. ResEdit uses Apple's 16-bit LM. * The Dialog Editor is WYSIWYG in one window, representing and looking just like the Dialog you expect. ResEdit uses two windows. RR supports 'ictb' resources integrally. ResEdit has no support, and is flaky in a big way. RR's editor can create a self-contained C starter source code file that will generically run the Dialog for you. RR can run the dialog for you while you are editing, so you can both see and try out your custom controls. Likewise all your balloon help. [continued]