The disk goes for a little bit, and then the changes you made to your file are permanently saved onto disk. And the final result of all this can be seen in button example #8.
... and there you go. Now there wasn't anything too overly difficult about that! You've just taken your first plunge into ResEdit and escaped unscathed. The other menus in the Finder can be altered in the same fashion, as can the menus in any program that has a resource type MENU. Now let's have some fun with some desktop icons.
ICN#'s here we come...
A large portion of the Mac's ease of use stems from its usage of icons to get around. ResEdit makes changing existing icons or replacing them entirely a snap once you know the few basic steps involved. Since we want to alter the icons that the Mac uses when we're on the desktop, the resource we're after is ICN# (see previous description). Most programs only have one; however, the Finder has several of these because it's responsible for providing them for files that may not normally have one assigned.
