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Issue 2.1

REVIEW

Profile: ResFool

Issue: 2.1 (August/September 2003)
Author: Greg Fiumara
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 3,717
Starting Page Number: 8
Article Number: 2103
Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

In the days of the Classic Mac OS, developers swore by their copy of ResEdit, the free Apple resource editor. A resource editor is a program that allows one to view the various resources of any file. If you ever had a question about how an application worked, you could likely find your answer with ResEdit. Then came Mac OS X. Apple did not have plans for porting ResEdit to Mac OS X and thus it died. Another powerful resource editor for the Classic Mac OS was Resorcerer. Resorcerer was ported to Mac OS X but no new features had been added and the $256 price tag stopped potential developer buyers in their tracks. Shareware company MacFearonni started development of a Mac OS X native resource editor, MacResourceDog but stopped in 2002. However, now in 2003, the La Jolla Underground has released a new attempt at a resource editor. Dubbed ResFool, it is the newest resource editor on the market, has a road map that may make it the most successful, and is being developed by a fellow REALbasic user.

When one opens a file in ResFool, he or she is presented with a listbox with many listings of what may seem to be random groupings of four characters. These groupings of characters represent resource types. For example, a resource type of "PICT" represents a picture. Double-clicking on a row brings another listbox to the screen, this time with numbers. The numbers represent the ID of the resource. Double-clicking on an ID will present another window. If you see a lot of numbers and letters in this new window, you have launched a hex editor, or the part of the program which displays hexadecimal data. If you see a somewhat organized window with GUI element, you have launched a resource template.

One of the powerful features of ResEdit and Resorcerer was the ability to have resource templates. A resource template is a way to interpret binary resource data. For example, if one viewed a PICT resource without a resource template, they would see hexadecimal. With a resource template, they would see a picture and picture editing features. ResFool currently features 94 template types, far more than ResEdit, and there are plans for more. One of the major resource templates that ResFool has is for the "aete" or Apple Event resource. Apple Events are the resources that make an application controllable by Apple Script. One of the reasons developers purchased Resorcerer was because it had a powerful "aete" editor. Now, ResFool has the same functionality with a price tag around $230 dollars less.

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