The Macintosh was intended to be different in many ways. One of them was its file system, which was designed for each file to consist of two forks, one a regular data fork as in normal file systems, the other a structured database of resources, the resource fork.
Resources came to be used to store a lot of standard structured data, such as the specifications for and contents of alerts and dialogs, menus, collections of text strings, keyboard definitions and layouts, icons, windows, fonts, and chunks of code to be used by apps. You could extend the types of resource supported by means of a template, itself stored as a resource, so developers could define new resource types appropriate to their own apps.
↫ Howard Oakley
And using ResEdit, a tool developed by Apple, you could manipulate the various resources to your heart’s content. I never used the classic Mac OS when it was current, and only play with it as a retro platform every now and then, so I ever used ResEdit when it was the cool thing to do. Looking back, though, and learning more about it, it seems like just another awesome capability that Apple lost along the way towards modern Apple.
Perhaps I should load up on my old Macs and see with my own eyes what I can do with ResEdit.
I discovered the joy of resedit in my first QuarkXPress class. I was advanced and teacher hated when i just went and helped other students. Until i was quietly asked to not attend anymore, i resorted to play around with the os and installed some emulators to pass the time. One must know i was already editing a newspaper using it. But i digress.
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The original macintosh platform was a true beauty of usability mixed with a frankensteinian underbelly that evolved from packed routines in a rom to a modernish os. It was fun because it was risky to use, extensions management required dark knowledge to master properly. When everything was right, it was smooth as butter…
Resedit was an absolute requirement back in the day. Along with Conflict Catcher and stuff it, it formed part of basically every mac setup
I think the modern Mac equivalent is using bundled directories with metadata and hidden internal structure.
When I download an “App”, it is actually a whole directory which I can browse into (right click -> show package contents). It has everything mentioned like the program icons and resources and you can still tinker, especially if you have Xcode for some of the structures.
Not sure old format would have survived the Internet. Even the new one is distributed essentially as ZIP files.
They could have done stuff like making Finder transparently convert stuff to/from AppleSingle (essentially A/UX’s in-house counterpart to MacBinary or BinHex) dragging to/from a DOS floppy, provided the APIs and developer docs to encourage things things like FTP tools to do likewise, and had the OS have an extensible store of which type codes are “data-only”, meaning to opt out of the automatic AppleSingle-ing.
Yes,
There could have been other solutions.
My favorite hack is that the Finder is actually just and Application so if you used resedit to change the Type code from FNDR to APPL on a copy of Finder, you could then launch it as a normal application. I even launched a copy of Finder under OSX Classic environment which worked in first few OSX versions. Enable the Quit menu in Finder so you can launch various versions.
Similar to FoolProof, Apple had “At-Ease”. If your admin allowed you to run ClarisWorks, just change the creator code of the Finder APP to match Clarisworks. Then you could just launch the Finder directly from At Ease because it thought it was an allowed app. You could also use hypercard to launch APPs that At Ease would not, ro “Close” att ease after you launched Fiber App.
I also liked changing the type of dial boxes to the type that you could move around screen. You could extract and transplant SND (Sound) resources.
Don’t forget to use ResEdit on the Mac “System” file itself which could change many system wide things like alert sounds, cursors, FONTs, startup screen, and about this Mac window.
Is this from where Microsoft copied resource files for Windows?
No, windows resource file is a binary database where as this allows to edit auxiliary components of program like icons, text, even menus.
gagol2,
I could be misunderstanding you, but your description sounds more like the window registry. It’s a binary database.
Windows resource files are kind of like an archive for text/icons/fonts/cursors/dialogs/menus/etc.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/menurc/about-resource-files
These resources are typically linked into the executable rather than standalone.
I’m not familiar with macos resources & resedit, but from the discussion here it sounds like they serve the same or similar purpose.
My bad, i did had registry in mind. Jgfenix i apologize and will blame my aging brain to avoid shame. Alfman, yes they are same concept.
IIRC correctly though M$ apps almost never used the Resource Fork of System (before being called MacOS that was its name).
Many other apps made extensive use of Resources, including in their docs, and playing around with ResEdit was 1- pure fun, and 2- quite useful and full of info if your could stand Pascal (the original programming language of the Mac, C/C++ were added much later, with CodeWarrior I believe) and were interested in developing for the Mac.
OT: given that nobody is commenting on the relevant thread anymore, now that Fox is getting on the same Ad train like Chrome et al, are there other “safe” browsers out there?
Cheers
The resource fork and ResEdit were a major contributor to making Macintosh games easy to mod via a standard format, because, if you were a developer and your game was mac-only or mac-first, you were almost certainly going to take advantage of the ready-made packfile format and packfile editor/beginnings of a content creation framework that Apple provided you.
Hell, if I remember correctly, the color MacRisk versions you see floating around were made much later, without access to the Black & White version’s source, using ResEdit.