ResEdit is a discontinued developer tool application for the

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

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, used to create and edit resources directly in the Mac's

resource fork A resource fork is a fork of a file on Apple's classic Mac OS operating system that is used to store structured data. It is one of the two forks of a file, along with the data fork, which stores data that the operating system treats as unstruct ...

architecture. It was an alternative to tools such as REdit, and the resource

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that Translator (computing), translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primaril ...

''Rez.'' For the average user, ResEdit was generally easier to use, because it used a

graphical user interface A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...

. Although it had been intended to be a developer tool, power users often used it to edit icons, menus, and other elements of an application's GUI, customizing it to their own preferences. Resources on the Macintosh could be of many different types, and in fact any arbitrary data could be turned into a resource. While the

system A system is a group of interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole. A system, surrounded and influenced by its open system (systems theory), environment, is described by its boundaries, str ...

defined many standard formats for particular kinds of resources (for example, an icon, or a window template), programmers were also free to define their own. ResEdit included support for editing many of the standard types and for creating arbitrary resources with any structure a programmer saw fit. ResEdit was one of the earliest examples of a GUI layout tool, an essential component for

rapid application development Rapid application development (RAD), also called rapid application building (RAB), is both a general term for adaptive software development approaches, and the name for James Martin's method of rapid development. In general, RAD approaches to ...

. For example, the

classic Mac OS Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Mac (computer), Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and end ...

defined a standard resource called a dialog template and a dialog items list (resource types 'DLOG' and 'DITL' respectively). In ResEdit, it was possible to simply create these types and add GUI elements to them in an almost

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for what you see is what you get, refers to software that allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed document, web ...

fashion, such that a user interface could be designed directly as it would appear to the end user of the application. Later, the application code could create a functional

dialog box In computing, a dialog box (also simply dialog) is a graphical control element in the form of a small window that communicates information to the user and prompts them for a response. Dialog boxes are classified as " modal" or "modeless", dep ...

using the stored resource data which matches the appearance you lay out in ResEdit. When ResEdit first appeared in the mid-1980s, this was a revolutionary innovation, today it is commonplace for programmers. ResEdit includes standard editors for window templates (WIND), menus (MENU), dialog boxes, controls (CNTL), color palettes (clut and pltt), icons (ICON, cicn, ICN#), and various other standard types. One of ResEdit's most powerful features (which first appeared with ResEdit version 2.0) is the ability to define arbitrary data structures as resources using a simple template building feature. Here, the programmer can simply add elemental data types to a list to define a template (itself stored as a resource of type TMPL). This template allows ResEdit to build a GUI editor on the fly that allows entry of data and package it into the structure defined in the template. It's a simple matter for a programmer to define a matching data structure in a chosen programming language, such as C, load the resource in a standard manner and access the data as the defined C type. ResEdit includes a number of predefined templates for many standard OS resources that do not require a graphical editor. ResEdit was never upgraded to run natively on

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-based Macintoshes after the migration from

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, and not on

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. Apple now discourages the use of resource forks in new macOS applications, preferring the more portable

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-derived application bundles. A long-standing third-party commercial alternative named Resorcerer remains available, and more recently there have been a number of attempts to build open-source macOS-native resource editors, including one called ResKnife. ResEdit will run in Mac OS X's Classic compatibility mode, but Classic is neither available on Intel Macintosh computers, nor in Mac OS X v10.5 or later. However, an Intel Mac can run ResEdit via an emulator such as SheepShaver or Basilisk II. The last official version of ResEdit is 2.1.3, released in August 1994. Unofficial hacks released as ResEdit 2.1.4 and later exist, adding features such as a

decompiler A decompiler is a computer program that translates an executable file back into high-level source code. Unlike a compiler, which converts high-level code into machine code, a decompiler performs the reverse process. While disassemblers translate e ...

and the ability to edit data forks, but these are unsupported by Apple.

References

External links

ResEdit Reference
(

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

)
Download ResEdit 2.1.3 from apple.com
( MacBinary) {{DEFAULTSORT:Resedit Macintosh operating systems development Classic Mac OS-only software made by Apple Inc. Discontinued development tools User interface builders Classic Mac OS programming tools

See also

References

External links