Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!bsu-cs!mithomas From: mithomas@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Michael Thomas Niehaus) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: Fkeys (actually, ResEdit article in MacUser) Keywords: fkeys, resedit Message-ID: <7069@bsu-cs.bsu.edu> Date: 3 May 89 03:13:40 GMT References: <264@radar.UUCP> <2509@nmtsun.nmt.edu> <1257@novavax.UUCP> <30205@sri-unix.SRI.COM> Distribution: na Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, IN, USA Lines: 48 In article <30205@sri-unix.SRI.COM>, stores@unix.SRI.COM (Matt Mora) writes: > > I Just received MacUser in the mail and they have an article on using > resedit. It might be good reading. > I just read this article today, and I believe MacUser could have done better. The person writing the article appears to be familiar with ResEdit, but their knowledge of what is actually going on seems lacking. Here is one quote that caused me to lose faith in the author: "All Macintosh applications, whether public domain, shareware, or commer- cially published, consist of two separate forks: a data fork and a resource fork. The data fork is the programmer's code that makes an application do what it is supposed to do." He goes on in this same paragraph to say: "The resource fork controls what you actually see on the screen." If I were an English major, I would criticize the writing style as being "too loose and informal." But since I am not... The author does give a long guided tour to the typical application's resources. In this case, a "typical application" is MacWrite. This section can give you some idea of what is going on, but for some reason MacUser decided to use 9-point type for this section -- all three and a half pages of it. I don't know about you, but that hurts my eyes when reading long sections. Maybe it is because their editor was an editor for PC Magazine for 6 years :-) Also, the same person that wrote the ResEdit article (six and a half pages, including diagrams) also wrote the Tip Sheet column this month, another three pages about customizing the Finder using (what else) ResEdit. By MacUser's policies, he should have received $100 for this tip... At the end of the article, the author mentions the following, making the prior three pages useless: "You can also accomplish many of these tasks using a freeware program called Layout!" Sigh. I sometimes wonder why I subscribe to this magazine. -Michael -- Michael Niehaus UUCP: !{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!mithomas Apple Student Rep ARPA: mithomas@bsu-cs.bsu.edu Ball State University AppleLink: ST0374 (from UUCP: st0374@applelink.apple.com)