Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!dewey.soe.berkeley.edu!oster
From: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: resource editor gripes
Message-ID: <23728@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 24 Apr 88 14:40:07 GMT
References: <177@wayne.analog.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster)
Organization: School of Education, UC-Berkeley
Lines: 66
Keywords: resource editor

In article <177@wayne.analog.UUCP> kim@analog.UUCP (Kim Helliwell) 
gives a list of gripes about ResEdit. Here are the work arounds:
>Here is what I would like to see:

>    1. A decent font editor which doesn't crash or scramble fonts.
I use Fontastic. It is reasonably proced and well supported.

>    2. A graphic menu editor which is faster than the current slooooow
>       one.
I just edited its Type=TMPL Id=7, Name="MENU" resource, so that all the
style items are on hex byte (HBYT) instead of a series of radio buttons.
That simplifies the editor enough that it flys.

>    3. Graphic interfaces wherever possible and appropriate (ie, ability
>       to draw PICT resources directly in the editor, rather than the
>       current roundabout method of generatine PICT's.)
Huh? I run MacDraw/MacPaint and resedit side by side in Multifinder. when
i want to edit a pict, i cut it in resEdit, paste it in MacDraw, edit it,
cut it in MacDraw, and paste in ResEdit. What could be more
straightforward?

>    4. A reasonable text editor method for generating text resources.
I use a text editor. The same cut and paste technique works just fine.

>    5. A simple well documented way of including custom editors in the 
>       main shell (Apple promised years ago to tell how to do this with
>       ResEdit, but as far as I know, has never done so)
It was completely documented in the Spring '87 (I believe) software
supplement.  You can replace any subeditor in ResEdit with your own, or
add one.


I don't understand why people think they need editors built in to resedit
when they can just cut and paste data between resedit and really good
editors.  Sure, it is no fun searching a dozen text resources to find a
string, but in about 10 minutes you can write a little C program to take a
resource file of text resources (say the finder comments in the Desktop
file) and write each to a folder naming each (if its resource id is, say
202, "202.c") Then, just add them to a LightSpeed C project, and use
LightSpeed C's multi-file searching to find the component you want. A C
program to reverse the process is also trivial.  MPW users won't need to
go through the kluge of giving the files a bogus ".c" extension.

Similarly, I wrote a trivial program (about an hour's work) to convert
entire ICONs into color quickdraw patterns (Patterns in color quickdraw
may be any square with a length that is a power-of-2. Therefore, 32x32
patterns are quite reasonable. (extending this to
make the upper left 512x512 square of a macpaint picture into a single
pattern is also trivial))

Once again, I'll explain the point many people miss: if you enter resedit,
with a PICT on your clipboard, open a file and hit 'paste' ResEdit pastes
the pict into the file. Same with TEXT. If you select one PICT or TEXT and
copy it to the clipboard in resEdit, then it will still be on the
clipboard when you leave resedit.  In resedit sub-editors like the ICON or
CURSor editor will cut and pate PICTs, if you use the shift key while you
mousedown and drag, to sweep out a destination rectangle.


(Another nice thing about programming the mac: GetResource() and
AddResource() are incredibly easy to use i/o functions. Makes me wince at
the number of hours I spent in school learning to write parsers.)

Copyright (c) 1988 by David Phillip Oster, All Rights Reserved
--- David Phillip Oster            --When you asked me to live in sin with you
Arpa: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --I didn't know you meant sloth.
Uucp: {uwvax,decvax,ihnp4}!ucbvax!oster%dewey.soe.berkeley.edu