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Text File | 1992-05-07 | 19KB | 113 lines

About Resorcerer® 1.1 Spring, 1992 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks for your interest in our award-winning Macintosh® resource editor, Resorcerer®. We hope the following information is enough to answer some of your questions about it. Resorcerer is a 900K application that has been in use and under continuous development for the last five years. It features a single window file interface that lets you browse resources easily; visible accumulating clipboard file; resource hex/text searching; resource marking; visible editing attributes (including which ones are open, which changed); ability to change IDs, attributes, and even types of any group of resources all at once, with undo; integral data fork editing; simple scripting language for building complex resource files; compatibility with Mac programming guidelines; powerful, consistent, and well-designed interface features that solve many common problems; rich set of user preferences; and individual Editors for the most common Mac application resources. Unlike Apple’s ResEdit, Resorcerer is not a “resource map” editor. You don’t have to create a type, for instance, prior to creating a resource of that type. You can open and close files that have no “resource forks” without being asked if you want to create one. You don’t need more than one command to “open” a file. Resource maps are Apple’s private data structure, and editing or verifying one, via ResEdit, is their responsibility. However, the whole purpose of resources, and the Resource Manager’s manipulation of them, is to hide from “the rest of us” any details of resource maps. They should be of no concern to the person who just wants to edit a string, dialog, menu, or custom resource, which is what 99% of the use of a resource editor is all about. Should Apple change the format of resource maps in the future (which they would dearly love to do), Resorcerer will continue to work; old versions of ResEdit will become obsolete and probably dangerous. Resorcerer minimally, but compatibly, relies on the Mac's Resource Manager to read resource data in once, and to write changed resources back out. It is more intuitive and easier to use because of its ignorance of resource maps, and safer as well (for instance, Resorcerer makes no patches to any system traps, and basically knows nothing about resource maps, which should properly be a Resource Manager private data structure). Resorcerer 1.1 is MPW Projector aware, Apple event aware, and can be called upon by other software to open and edit any resource in any file. Approximately 1/4 of Resorcerer is dedicated to editing dialogs (including alerts, control panels, and windows). The color Dialog Editor has been called the best in the world (one recent customer described it as “exceeding my wildest dreams”) and is more powerful and elegant than ResEdit, Prototyper, AppMaker, etc. It features • WYSIWYG color MacDraw®-like environment • Special integrated support for Lists, PopUps, OK and Cancel buttons • Visible item numbers that are a separate field while editing • Item numbers settable with just a mouse click or by typing • Items growable from any corner • Supports System 7.0 Moveable Modal windows under System 6 • Item grouping, for dragging, growing, auto-sizing, and stretching • Special support for hidden, overlapping, or buried items • Grid snapping, with margins, alignment tool, and optional visible grid • Ability to run the dialog directly through the Dialog Manager • Integral color table (actb, dctb, and ictb) support • Prints, screen copies, and decompiles (Rez output to the clipboard) • C starter code generator, that supports Lists and Popup Menu items. • Supports any number of System 7.0 Help items. • Can edit System 7 CustomGetFile dialogs (ResEdit 2.1.1 cannot). • Checks for Balloon Help inconsistencies • Lets you try out your Balloon Help. Resorcerer’s color MENU/cmnu/CMNU Editor is more powerful than even ResEdit 2.1's new menu editor. You can cut and paste any selection of menu items, reorder a menu without cutting and pasting, see all hierarchical references, and set any of the fields kept in the menu color table, with easy copying and pasting of RGB menu colors. The sample menu in the menu bar always resolves all hierarchical references, including any colored hierarchical menus, and lets you try out your balloon help. It also edits MacApp-style 'cmnu'/'CMNU' resources. And it DeRez’s to the clipboard. The Editor supports Resorcerer’s text searching mechanism, so you can easily find and open all menus with a particular command word in them. The dedicated StringList (STR#) editor lets you see the index of all strings, lets you display them in any font, print them, search them, lets you cut and paste any selection of strings as individual objects, lets you import strings as text, lets you reorder without cutting and pasting. It also DeRez’s to the clipboard. Text searching with autohighlight is supported for finding strings by content. All of Resorcerer’s graphic resources allow screen-copying under MultiFinder, so that you can use your favorite black & white or color paint program to design color icons, picts, bitmaps, patterns, etc. The ‘clut’ Editor also lets you screen copy. There are dedicated editors/screen copiers for these standard resource types (and their synonyms): ALRT, actb, bmap, BNDL, cicn, clut, cmnu, CNTL, cctb, CURS, DLOG, DITL, dctb, FREF, ICN#, ICON, icl4, icl8, ics4, ics8, icm8, icm4, ics#, ictb, MENU, mctb, nrct, PAT , PAT#, PICT, POST, SICN, SIZE, snd , STR , STR#, styl, TEXT, TMPL, TYP#, vers, WIND, wctb, and WSTR resources. In addition, Resorcerer has the most powerful and elegant, 32-bit, list-based, TMPL-driven Custom Data Structure Editor you’ve ever seen. It’s compatible with ResEdit TMPL resources, but it supports many TMPL field types that ResEdit does not (all told, 90 types at last count - nearly three times as many as ResEdit), including numbered bit fields, RGB colors, recursive TMPLs, dates, fixed point numbers, floating point (single, double, extended 80, extended 96 bit, and THINK Universal 96-bit precision), byte and long counted lists, fixed-length lists (arrays), sized indefinite lists, dedicated resource ID fields so that you can open referenced resources directly from the editor, skip offsets (similar to sizeof fields), sized hex data fields, disassembled code dumps, and more. If you use the demo to create a TMPL resource, you can see in a popup menu all the supported types while you are editing. There are fields for supporting keyed or variant records (e.g. Rez “switch” statements), so that you can open and edit System 7.0 Balloon Help resources, MPW Commando resources, Installer 3.3 scripts, even MacApp 3.0 ‘View’ and QuickTime ‘moov’ resources, and lots of other important types that ResEdit cannot hope to deal with. One extremely nice feature is that any field can have a list of symbolic constant names for the various common values the field takes on. This list is kept in the TMPL itself, and the editor converts it to a PopUp menu. You choose the name and the editor stores the value (when editing, you can see both). The first CASE is always used as the value of new field, so the TMPL can ensure that certain fields are always created with a legal default value (0 is not always legal). Field types and field offsets (hex or decimal) can be temporarily made visible. Hex or decimal offsets, and field types are easily viewable or tucked out of sight. You can print all fields in the resource editing session (not just window screen dump). And there’s a dedicated Template (TMPL) Editor with auto-indent that lets you choose from all legal TMPL field types without your having to remember what all those obscure 4-character field types are, or which ones are compatible with ResEdit and which are extensions. Experienced TMPL-designers can do so in their Text Editor of choice, and import the TMPL fields into the dedicated Template Editor in one Copy and Paste. For resources that can’t be fully described by TMPLs, you can use Resorcerer’s resource filtering system to pre- and post-process resources to make them temporarily editable. Nearly all possible data structures (that have anything in them worth editing) are interactively editable with Resorcerer. This includes resources that cannot be compiled with Rez, indexed lists, compacted resources, privately encrypted resources, pre-computed hash tables, resources with checksum fields, resources with alternate structures based on non-data information (like what the resource ID is), and just about any other algorithmically determined structure. This lets you design a template for those parts of a resource that humans should attend to, and an algorithmic code resource for those structural parts of a resource that the computer is better at attending to. Because the filter code need have no user-interface, filters are much easier to create as code resources than a complete ResEdit editor might be. A filter’s sole responsibility is to convert one handle of data into another handle of data, and then back again. An added benefit is that filters can be used by your own application. The application comes with more than a 140 redesigned TMPLs. Installing your own TMPLs is as simple as dropping a file of them into your “Resorcerer® Templates” or “Private Templates” folder. Resorcerer 1.1 will resolve any aliases to template files as well, so that multi-person projects can keep just one master set of private templates, while allowing each programmer's own copy of Resorcerer to access them. You can choose any font in which to display data when editing. This is great for localizers; you can have different text styles installed as your preferences for any of the various editors. Even the CODE/Hex Editor works in any type style. When TMPLs won’t do, Resorcerer’s 32-bit Code/Hex Editor lets you use as much or as little of your screen as you want; edits in any font; shows the current insertion point/selection range at all times; supports hex/ascii searching, with independent non-modal simultaneous searches for separately opened resources. Especially nice is its ability to format your hex into marked paragraphs, with paragraph-relative offsets and visible paragraph marking. This makes analyzing a hex resource into its separate fields and embedded tables much easier (analyzing an unknown resource structure using ResEdit’s Hex Editor is an unbelievably frustrating waste of precious time, if not impossible). Either hex or decimal offsets are possible. And it DeRez's directly to the clipboard, with or without commented offset information. Resorcerer 1.1 knows comes with knowledge of some 40 different code resource types, so that when you open one of them, the Code/Hex Editor disassembles the code and lets you fix bugs, search, or edit the hex or text data. Unlike ResEdit 2.1.1’s add-on code editor, Resorcerer can do all editing integrated in one simple window. You can select any number of intructions; cut and paste as code, hex, or text; DeRez, print; and search non-modally. All Macsbug, Toolbox, and low-memory global names are resolved for you; you can disassemble in either hex or decimal, using either Macsbug-name-relative or PC-relative addresses. A special Routines menu alphabetically sorts large collections of Macsbug names into hierarchical alphabetical order so that scrolling to any particular routine is fast and easy. And a special Patch menu lets you make common length preserving patches (setting code to NOPs, branching around selected code, and resetting a branch condition code). All 68000-68040, FPU, PMMU instructions are disassembled, and in conjunction with the Value Converter (mentioned below), you can even edit your instructions in binary (just like your Motorola assembly language manual documents them!). Resorcerer’s Value Converter lets you see and edit any 32-bit value in any of a dozen standard Mac formats, including binary, octal, hex, unsigned, fixed point (three kinds), float, character, etc. Most of Resorcerer dialog boxes will accept either decimal or hex input wherever a decimal number is called for. When the Value Converter finds itself over a Hex Editing window, it automatically hot links itself to any 1-, 2-, or 4-byte selection and lets you edit the selection in any of the above dozen formats. Resorcerer will compare two resource files, showing you exactly which resources in each file are different in some way from any counterparts in the other file. Simply open the two files and choose Compare Two Files.... You can define the type of differences you want, and every "different" (or unique) resource is marked for you. Once marked, you can go on and edit them normally. Our new Resorcerer 1.1 includes a simple, C/Rez-like scripting language that works in conjunction with Resorcerer's interactive editing capability. It is currently not a full-scale resource compiler; but it does, however, allow you to automate repetitive resource management tasks, and it is certainly powerful enough to help manage the building of Resorcerer itself, which is what we use it for. The language supports simple C preprocessor symbolic constants in included header files, so that you can use your standard symbolic resource ID header files; conditional execution based on defined constants; including/excluding resources from many different files into one working file; changing attributes and resource IDs; including data files or parts of data files as resources; and excellent error reporting. Resorcerer does not do everything that ResEdit does. It has no support for font-related resources (other than what can be described in a TMPL). Fonts are getting so complicated (it takes more than 30 pages just to describe the fields in Apple’s new ‘sfnt’ TrueType™ font resource) that you should be using a dedicated font-editing application, of which there are a number now available (hardly anyone uses ResEdit to edit fonts anymore). Resorcerer 1.1 will not let you sort resources by anything other than ID (e.g. size, name). It cannot repair a damaged resource map (it’s also lots less likely to create one!). It currently does not support MacApp-style ‘view’/‘View’ resources graphically (although you can edit all the fields in a ‘view’/‘View’ as an extensible data structure). And current versions of Resorcerer will not let you save any changes to an open System file or to itself (whether this is a feature or a bug is open to debate; we think it’s a feature). You can open and browse your System file and any of its resources, however, and editing a copy of the System file is perfectly fine. ResEdit 2.1.1 features a good Finder color icon editor that is well-designed and self-contained. Resorcerer’s philosophy is that if you are interested in color icons, you should be using a dedicated color paint program, which will always have features in it that will be missing from the simple abilities that any resource editor implements. Resorcerer can screen-copy color icons of any size. If you don't have a color paint program, then you can always use ResEdit 2.1’s color icon painting editor. We hope to alleviate this situation sometime soon, as it is the only regular activity our users ever have to go back to ResEdit for. Resorcerer 1.1 will allow you to design your own resource “pickers” (code resources compiled in either C or Pascal), which basically draw the value of a given resource into the file window’s resource list. However, 1.1 will not support the addition of your own dedicated editors (see the discussion above about resource template filters, though). And unlike ResEdit (which is an internal Apple program that they misguidedly think is a good idea to give away), Resorcerer is not free. Precisely because of this, we respond to bugs, feature requests, etc. more quickly than Apple (where ResEdit is a loss leader, and where people work on it sporadically), and we can afford to value our customer’s needs more highly, with more personal support. You know exactly whom to go to when a problem arises, rather than depending on snippets of anonymous code/advice/patches culled from bulletin boards/user groups/etc.. And we know exactly who to go to in case of bug fixes or updates. If a bug in Resorcerer is keeping you from getting your work done, we will work with you directly to get the problem fixed as best we can. Resorcerer is currently the resource editor of choice at many well-known Mac software companies. Literally thousands of programmers are relying on it since we began testing the waters over 2 years ago, and it has benefitted from many cumulative suggestions from its users. It is, as you might guess, quickly proving to be more popular than ResEdit, including ResEdit 2.1. A significant number of our present customers are from abroad, including France, Italy, Germany, Britain, Belgium, Australia, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Czechoslovakia, Japan, and Israel. This is due to Resorcerer’s superlative ease of use, special features for localizers, its text searching, file comparison, and ability to edit and view strings, text, resource names, even hex, in any type-style. MacUser Magazine bestowed an Honorable Mention upon Resorcerer as one of the three Best Developer Tools of 1990. MacUser UK awarded it 4 mice in a recent review. Resorcerer is an on-going and evolving program. It is available now (version 1.1) directly from us (Mathemaesthetics, Inc). It costs US $256 (decimal). We also offer quantity and educational discounts, and site licenses, from 20-40% off of list price. If you want mail delivery abroad, please add $14. If you want FedEx delivery, add $14 for US; $54 for abroad. If you want UPS Blue, add $4; UPS Red, $14; $54 for abroad. If you want UPS or FedEx COD (US only), add $5 (note: FedEx will not accept actual cash). You can order Resorcerer, with 60-day money-back guarantee, by sending us • a check made out to Mathemaesthetics, Inc., • a US company Purchase Order (Faxes OK) • your Visa/Mastercard number (don't forget the expiration date!). • any domestic order with COD shipping. Our address is Mathemaesthetics, Inc. P.O. Box 67-156 Chestnut Hill, MA 02167 USA Phone: 1-617-738-8803 Fax: 1-617-738-0164 AppleLink: RESORCERER Please include your shipping and/or billing address and (importan!) your phone number. We also have created a demo version of the application, which features the full user-interface, but which cannot save changes, print, DeRez, or create starter C source code. The demo is nearly as large as the original; we can send you a copy if you send us your mailing address. If you are a Macintosh professional, or anyone who knows that a better user interface can save you time and money, let us know when you would like to order a copy. We expect you will like Resorcerer and be more productive using it. Thanks for your interest. Mathemaesthetics, Inc.