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Resources inside your application
Issue: 1.4 (February/March 2003)
Author: Christian Schmitz
Author Bio: Christian Schmitz has written several articles for the German magazine
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 4,980
Starting Page Number: 37
Article Number: 1419
Related Link(s): None
Excerpt of article text...
Avoiding a Thousand Files?
Compare REALbasic and Visual Basic. REALbasic is a standalone application which can live without any files around. Plugins, Soundtracks, Scripts, and Stationaries are all optional. And applications made with REALbasic are self-contained, too. No runtime files, no data files, just an application file.
Visual Basic itself comes with thousands of files installed on your PC. And every application you make requires the VB runtime library with a dozen supporting DLLs, and of course several data files.
In general we should always try to make live easy and for this we want one application to be one file, easily installed in Finder or Explorer via Drag-and-Drop and easily uninstalled using the Trash. REALbasic helps but still there is the question of how to handle the resources of your app. On the Mac OS you may put up to 16 MB of data into a resource file, but there are no resource files like on the Mac available for Windows. Indeed, Microsoft long ago designed a file format in which a data file can contain resources like sounds or pictures, which is still used for applications, but you can't have independent resources and data in a single file like on a Macintosh.
Pictures
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