Resorcerer 2
Volume Number: 10
Issue Number: 4
Column Tag: Tools Of The Trade
Resorcerer: A Fan’s Notes 
Just a few of the many reasons Resorcerer has so many avid followers
By Philip Borenstein
About the author
Philip enjoys family outings featuring his famous dogcow barbeque, and
celebrates the Macintosh enthusiasts holiday of Jan. 1, 1904 by changing as many files
on as many disks as possible.
Several years ago, a friend who used to write about the club scene for a Boston
weekly caught some flack for writing well about a band she was particularly fond of.
When I asked her about it, she said “Look, when you go out to clubs to hear bands
almost every night, you’re bound to have some favorites. They’re not the only band I
write about, but when I get a chance to do so, I’ll say good things about them.”
After several years in the Macintosh development tools business, I’ve grown fond
of some programs. Mathemaesthetics’ Resorcerer is definitely one of them. In the
interest of disclosure, let me say up front that I’ve used Resorcerer for five years and
that Doug McKenna (Resorcerer’s author) has been a friend of mine for four. When he
needed it, I helped him out by writing a chapter of his manual. If it helps, don’t think
of this as a review; think of it as a fan’s notes.
Resorcerer by Mathemaesthetics, Inc. is a resource editor that lets you edit
almost any kind of Macintosh resource. It has over a dozen built-in editors to edit
resources like menus, icons, dialogs, cursors, strings, window templates, control
templates, and so on. For resources that can’t be edited with the built-in editors,
Resorcerer has a rich template-based editor, the data editor, that builds on and
surpasses ResEdit’s TMPL mechanism.
Why should you spend your hard-earned money to buy Resorcerer when you can
get ResEdit for free? That’s the question most people ask when they first see
Resorcerer. If you’ve already come upon ResEdit’s limitations, the answer is easy. The
real answer is that Resorcerer is better at editing many common resources. What’s
more, while development on ResEdit has slowed (the last major version was released
in 1991), Resorcerer has kept pace with the resource-editing needs of Macintosh
programmers.
Rather than talk about each of Resorcerer’s editors, I’ll describe the highlights
of some of the most-used editors and then discuss some general aspects of the program.
The Dialog Editor
The main job of a dialog editor is to help you design dialogs that your users can
understand. A good dialog editor should make it easy for you to create dialog items and
arrange them in the dialog window.
In Resorcerer, you choose dialog items from a hierarchical menu. In addition to
the standard dialog items ( buttons, static text, edit text, etc.), Resorcerer’s dialog
editor lets you create pop-up menus and lists. These two items types have become so
common, it’s hard to believe that they weren’t part of the original Dialog Manager
spec. Resorcerer creates user items for these two items. This implementation of
pop-up menus predates the pop-up menu CDEF introduced with System 7. But if you
prefer to use the pop-up menu control, you can create a control item corresponding to
a CNTL resource for the pop-up menu.
Usually, dialog items should be aligned properly and arranged in functional
groups. As you would expect, the dialog has an “Align to Grid” command. You can set the
size of the grid and choose to make the grid visible. You can also specify a margin to
make sure that dialog items don’t get too close to the edge of the dialog window. The
dialog editor provides commands that align selected items by their sides or centers. One
nice feature is the ability to align static text items using the ends of each items’ text
string instead of its item bounding box. Additionally, the dialog has a “Use Best Size”
command that resizes an item to an optimal size. For pictures, icons, and controls, the
dialog editor uses the item’s natural size; for static text, it increases or decreases the
height of the item to contain all the text; for buttons, it uses a minimum size of 66
pixels and a height of 20 pixels. For pop-up menu user items, the width of the ‘MENU’
is calculated and used.
Resorcerer’s dialog editor lets you design dialogs at full size, so you can see
exactly what they’ll look like. The “Try Out” command lets you run your dialog to see
how it feels, and “Starter Code” command generates C code that you can use to
prototype your application quickly. You’ll definitely need to edit the code, but it’s a
good way to get something up and running. The generated code knows how to deal with
any number of the two special user items that Resorcerer generates for pop-up menus
and scrolling lists.
The dialog editor has a command to add a balloon help item to the dialog. Unlike
ResEdit, this command works even if the help item is not the last item in the dialog.
The editor will even warn you about a little-known problem the Help Manager has with
help items in non-modal dialogs.
The Data Editor
The one feature that really sets Resorcerer apart from ResEdit is its
template-based data editor. The data editor allows you to edit resources for which there
is no built-in editor. Resorcerer uses the data editor to edit Apple event and Balloon
Help resources, for example. The data editor has its roots in ResEdit’s TMPL
mechanism but goes way beyond it.
You create TMPL resources that contain fields that describe the contents of the
resource. Resorcerer has a dedicated editor for displaying and editing TMPLs, and
makes it easy to import templates from text files as well. As in ResEdit, there are
template fields for words of various sizes, Pascal strings, C strings, lists, etc.
Resorcerer expands the kinds of fields to over 120 types (almost four times the
number the ResEdit’s field types) to include colors, system dates, code disassembly,
key-fields, and fixed- and floating-point numbers. One field type, SELF, allows you to
create recursive resources.
To give you an idea of the flexibility of Resorcerer’s TMPL mechanism, one of the
templates that comes with Resorcerer parses PICT resources. You can use this TMPL to
inspect pictures and to edit any strings embedded in the picture.
Resorcerer comes with over 180 TMPLs to edit virtually every kind of
Macintosh resource including Installer script resources, OCE resources, MacApp view
resources, Finder resources, and many more.
For resources that can’t be described easily with a TMPL, Resorcerer allows you
to write a filter that transforms the resource data into a form that you can edit with a
template and then writes the edited data into the resource’s natural form. A good use of
filters is for resources that begin with a list of offsets to other data. The filter scans
the resource data and creates a representation without the offsets so that it can be
edited with TMPL fields. Once you’re finished, the filter converts the representation to
include the offsets. Resorcerer comes with filter examples and the appropriate
interface files to get you started writing filters.
Rather than installing custom TMPL resources into Resorcerer itself, you place
files that contain TMPL resources into a special folder. Resorcerer scans this folder
when it starts up. To make it easier to develop custom resource templates, the data
editor lets you open the file that contains the TMPL resource so you can edit it.
Powerful as it is, the data editor has one drawback. To enter data for most field
types, you double-click on the field and type the data in a dialog box instead of typing
directly in the field. The data editor does have a command that lets you toggle the value
of a Boolean value without opening the field dialog box, and if a field takes one of
several values, you can easily set up a pop-up menu to make entering values easier.
Eventually you’ll develop “finger macros” to open the dialog box, enter the data and
close the dialog, but for long or complex resources, this approach to data entry can get
tedious quickly.
Unlike ResEdit, you can’t write custom editors for Resorcerer. While the
template-based data editor goes a long way to make up for this, there are some cases
where a custom editor is the best way to solve a problem. You can, however, write
simple code extensions (“pickers” in ResEdit lingo, “showers” in Resorcerer lingo)
for displaying the data of custom resources.
The Color Icon Editor
Resorcerer’s icon editor sports some features that you’d expect to find only in a
color paint program. In addition to the standard pixel-editing tools (pencil, paint
bucket, lasso, eraser, etc.), you’ll find a smudge tool and a text tool. When editing
8-bit pixels you can turn on anti- aliasing to make text, lines, and circles smoother.
With special key combinations, you can select all pixels of a particular color. With
other key combinations, you can use the color palette for live editing: as you choose
colors from the palette, the color of all the pixels in the selection or last filled area
change. This feature lets you see what different colors look like without having to apply
the color and then undoing the coloring. A dedicated dither palette lets you choose a
foreground “color” that is the di thered combination of any two colors. Another feature
that makes it easier to create an icon family is the snapshot list. At any point you can
take a snapshot of the icon and come back to it later.
Like ResEdit, Resorcerer’s icon editor is designed to let you create and edit an
entire icon family at once. Unlike ResEdit it has some bells and whistles to help you get
the job done faster. When you work on an 8-bit icon, you can have the icon editor
select all the colors that don’t conform to the 34 Apple-approved Finder icon colors. If
you like, you can have the icon editor map these colors to conforming colors. When you
copy an 8-bit icon to a 4-bit icon, you can let the icon editor choose the nearest 4-bit
color corresponds to the 8-bit color, or you can dither the 8-bit colors to 4-bit
colors.
All of the other editors that edit bit-mapped data, such as cursors and 'cicn'
resources work essentially the same way as the color icon editor. Unlike ResEdit,
Resorcerer’s ‘ppat’ editor supports ‘ppat’s with power-of-two dimensions all the way
up to 256 by 256.
General Features
Resorcerer is full of nice touches that programmers will appreciate. One very
handy command compares two resource files. Another allows you to search the entire
resource fork or a particular resource for a given hex or ASCII value. The “Change
All” command lets you change virtually any attribute (including resource type) of a
set of resources. For resources that can appear in dialogs and alerts, such as icons and
controls, a “Find Dialog Item References” command helps you find which dialog uses
the resource. For many resources, including icons and dialogs, the “Copy” command
can decompile the resource into Rez format and places the text on the Clipboard. One of
Resorcerer’s options lets you see the data fork of your file as if it were a resource.
This is very nice when you want to take a look at a file that stores data in both forks.
Even the nuances that seem at first to be purely ornamental turn out to have
practical foundations. For instance, when a window’s title is too long to fit in the title
bar, Resorcerer uses a smaller font so that the title will fit. When you have several
windows with similar titles on the screen, this small attention to detail becomes very
important.
Resorcerer is smart about some common programmer’s tricks. If it encounters a
definition procedure (WDEF, CDEF, MDEF, etc.) that is abnormally short, it will
ignore it and use a standard defproc instead. This keeps you from crashing when you
open windows that use the stub-WDEF technique.
Some of Resorcerer’s features are a little obscure until you discover a need for
them. For instance, the ‘TEXT’ editor has a “Create Text PICT” that may not appear to
be immediately useful. But suppose you want a Balloon Help item that contains a lot of
styled text and you don’t particularly care for the way the Help Manager formats it. In
that case, you use the text editor to format your text, create a picture of the text, and
use the picture in the help balloon.
Although Resorcerer is primarily an interactive editor, it also supports a simple
script language that lets you build a new resource file by including and excluding
resources from many other files. You can use the script to change the IDs, names, or
types of included resources before saving the final output file. The script language
supports simple C preprocesser definitions so that you can share symbolic constants
from your C project.
Unlike Rez, though, Resorcerer’s script language does not support compiling
resources directly. To run a script, you can drag and drop it on Resorcerer’s icon, or
open and run it directly from within the application.
Another useful feature is the value converter. This window lets you see the value
of any arbitrary 32 bits as up to a dozen or so standard Macintosh types. The value
converter hooks to any editor that displays hex data.
Unlike consumer-oriented applications where the number of options is kept to a
minimum, Resorcerer has a rich set of preferences settings to accommodate the whims
of all but the most finicky programmers. For example, in most cases, when you copy a
DLOG resource from one file to another, you probably want to take the corresponding
DITL as well, and that’s exactly what Resorcerer does. But if you like, you can change
the preferences to not include related resources in a selection. In that case, Resorcerer
warns you that your selection doesn’t include the related resource. And if you don’t like
that, you can change the preferences so that Resorcerer doesn’t even warn you that
your selection doesn’t include the related resources. There are options that let you
choose whether Resorcerer should use animated zoom rectangles to when you
double-click on a dialog item, which keys map to the tools in the icon editor, whether
Resorcerer should give you hints about commands and short cuts, and, of course,
whether to convert straight quotes to curly smart quotes. Being able to tune
Resorcerer like this means that there are a lot of preferences dialogs. In addition to a
multi-page program-wide preferences dialog, many of the major editors have their
own preferences dialog.
Documentation
The Resorcerer documentation comes in two wire-bound volumes. The first
volume, “User Manual,” discusses the basics of resources and resource editing and has
a chapter for each of the editors. The second volume, “Technical Stuff,” covers the
more technical editors including the code editor and the template editor, as well as the
syntax of the script language. There is a good tutorial section on designing custom
resource templates. Although you can use Resorcerer for a long time without reading
the manuals, they contain useful information about shortcuts and idiosyncrasies of the
Resource Manager.
For a technical application, Resorcerer has a surprising amount of on-line help.
The Balloon Help goes well beyond what you’ve probably come to expect (“Clicking this
check box turns this option on”). Resorcerer uses its Balloon Help to remind you of
the shortcuts and techniques to help you work faster. See, for example, the Balloon
Help for the lasso tool in the bitmap editors. This implementation probably doesn’t
follow the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines for Balloon Help (in fact, I don’t
think it will even fit on a 9-inch Classic screen), but it’s nice to know that the
information is available. Besides, you weren’t really going to read the manual anyway.
For some commands, Resorcerer displays a hint dialog that lets you know about
ways to perform some tasks and shortcuts you may have overlooked.
Conclusion
Resorcerer is a well-supported resource editor for professional programmers,
software localizers, and serious amateurs. If you use a resource editor only to change
application icons, to add or change menu command key equivalents, or to explore
applications, ResEdit may be good enough for you. But if you write Macintosh
applications for a living, particularly if your application stores some of its data in
application-specific resources, Resorcerer is the tool of choice. As far as I could tell,
there’s only one or two things that ResEdit can do that Resorcerer can’t. ResEdit gives
you some rudimentary tools to edit bitmapped fonts; it can change a folder’s Finder
attributes; and it can verify and make minor fixes to a damaged resource file.
This review just covers a few of Resorcerer’s editors. There are many more that
might be of particular use for you such as the code editor or the color table editor. The
best way to find out whether Resorcerer is for you, download (or call for) the demo
version. All of the editors are fully functional, you just can’t save changes to them.
Product Information
Resorcerer costs $256 and comes with a 60 day money-back gurantee. The
current version is 1.2.4. Upgrades from previous versions are $77. Volume and
educational discounts are available. A demo version is available free from
Mathemaesthetics and on AppleLink, America On Line, and CompuServe.
Mathemaesthetics, Inc.
P.O. Box 67156
Chestnut Hill, MA 02167 USA.
Telephone: (800) 738-8803
Fax: (617) 738-0164
America Online or AppleLink: Resorcerer
Internet: resorcerer@aol.com
CompuServe: 70521,1114