#ResEdit & Popup Menus
7 messages in this thread
Douglas,
I am interested in Resorcerer but I know nothing of its capabilities. Would you
mind comparing and contrasting Resorcerer to ResEdit?
Thanks
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]
* RR's Menu Editor lets you try out 'hmnu' resources, as well as hierarchical
sets of menus. You can cut and paste arbitrary selections of menu items, for
instance.
* RR has a dedicated 'STR#' editor [it can open a 'STR#' with 30,000 strings in
it in about 10 seconds on an unaccelerated Mac IIci).
* RR has a dedicated, auto-indenting 'TMPL' editor, with [minimal] on-line
help.
* RR's template system is vastly superior and more powerful than ResEdit's,
while remaining upwardly compatible with ResEdit 'TMPL's. RR supports over 90
template data parsing field types [soon to be about 120]. Templates are
extensible with simple code resources (actually filters), which means that you
can edit *any* data structure worth editing with a minimum amount of work. The
Custom Editor (which parses custom resources with TMPLs) is list-based, and can
easily handle data structures with 10s of thousands of fields. Support for
fixed and floating point, colors, dates, recursive lists, switch statements,
comments, symbolic constants, non-standard default values, hex and code dumps,
and lots more aren't in ResEdit.
* RR comes shipped with complete and full-featured TMPLs for many resources
that ResEdit can't handle: AppleEvent, Balloon Help, QuickTime, MacApp, and
many more. The upcoming version will have a huge filtered TMPL (50K, it took
me about 3 months to write it!) that completely opens and edits 'PICT'
resources as the opcode stream data structures they are.
* Most of the dedicated editors in RR DeRez directly to the clipboard.
* RR has a much nicer Hex Editor than ResEdit, especially for debugging/reverse
engineering. It's completely 32-bit, supports breaking the hex data into
marked paragraphs with paragraph-relative offsets, lets you grow the window to
any size.
* RR's 68040 Code Editor is completely integrated into the Hex Editor.
ResEdit's Code Editor, which is not an official part of ResEdit, is not. The
Code Editor supports making common length-preserving patches, and can edit very
large code resources.
* RR has a neat Value Converter accessory that lets you edit any 8-, 16-, or
32-bit quantity in any of a dozen formats (including binary, octal, fixed,
single float, etc.) simultaneously. The Converter can be hot linked to any Hex
Editor selection.
* RR takes up %50 more disk space than ResEdit.
* RR is not compatible with ResEdit 'RSSC' extensions.
* RR 1.1.1 does not have pixel-level editing for color icon resources. ResEdit
does.
However, the imminent version of RR 1.2 has outstanding support for Finder icon
suites, color cursors, and color icons [the 'cicn' editor is being finalized as
I write this]. Mini-icons, anti-aliasing, text, fancy selections, disconnected
selections, keyboard tool equivalents, etc. are all there.
[continued]
How's that for starters? There's a bunch more, but it's late :).
I have personally been working on Resorcerer (more than) full-time for about 5
years, and my company has been selling it direct to developers for about 3
years. Most of the Mac programs you see ads for are currently being built with
the aid of RR, judging from our customer list. Many of Apple's localizers use
RR, as do the localizers for many of the other big Mac developers. Significant
numbers of Apple's own engineers enjoy Resorcerer too, which is one reason why
you haven't seen a whole lot being done on ResEdit in the last year or two. My
job is to keep it that way! [Do you think Apple's going to be interested in
revising the significant portions of ResEdit that are still written in
assembler to the PowerPC? RR is 100% C code.]
We just sent out upgrade letters to all registered users for version 1.2 of
Resorcerer who bought it before April 1, 1993. If you bought it since April 1,
you didn't get a letter because you'll get the upgrade free (if we have your
registration card!). The package is in the final stages of production, so if
you've sent your upgrade check, please be patient. We're a little fish in a
big pond.
If you are interested, please order it direct from us. We dislike paying Apple
nearly 50% of our income when you buy it through APDA :(. Especially since
they use the money to subsidize our competition.
There is a demo in the Tools/Debuggers library here. When we release 1.2,
we'll be uploading a new demo. The demo's are pretty large, so we can send you
a disk in the mail also.
Doug McKenna
Chief Hierarchaeologist
Mathemaesthetics, Inc.
Vox: 1-617-738-8803
Fax: 1-617-738-0164
Doug,
Resorcerer sounds great! Thanks for the long description.
> The demo's are pretty large, so we can send you a disk in the mail also.
Please send the demo disk to me at:
John Carlsen
2 Hawthorne Place – 14J
Boston, MA 02114
Thanks,
John
"If you are interested, please order it direct from us. We dislike paying
Apple nearly 50% of our income when you buy it through APDA :(. Especially
since they use the money to subsidize our competition.
There is a demo in the Tools/Debuggers library here. When we release 1.2,
we'll be uploading a new demo. The demo's are pretty large, so we can send you
a disk in the mail also."
A demo would be great, although go ahead and hold off until the demo of v1.2
comes out.
Send to:
Steve Wagy
18706 Island Breeze
Spring, Texas 77379
Thanks. I'm really looking forward to trying it.
Steve
"Would you mind comparing and contrasting Resorcerer to ResEdit?"
Here are the top 2 reasons why I use Resorcerer:
1) ResEdit crashes frequently during use. Resorcerer has never crashed in 2
years of heavy use.
2) When ResEdit crashes, it often damages your resource file so it is unusable.
If your work is valuable, you must make a copy before each editing session.
Resorcerer is much nicer to use in many ways but these two reasons alone make
it worth the price of admission to me.
— Bill Goodman