rs4u+@andrew.cmu.edu (Richard Siegel) (04/25/88)
> 1. A decent font editor which doesn't crash or scramble fonts. Get FONTastic or Fontographer from Altsys; they're both fantastic dedicated font editors. > 2. A graphic menu editor which is faster than the current slooooow one. I have recently posted on to sumex.stanford.edu, and I'll post it to comp.binaries.mac, too.> > 3. Graphic interfaces wherever possible and appropriate (ie, ability to draw > PICT resources directly in the editor, rather than the current roundabout > method of generatine PICT's.) Why? It's so simple to draw the picture you want in the illustration program of your choice, and paste it in to your resource file, using the wonderful Macintosh standard copy/paste mechanism. > 4. A reasonable text editor method for generating text resources. (See above, substitute "type the text" for "draw the picture" and "text editor" for "illustration program".) > 5. A simple well documented way of including custom editors in the main > shell (Apple promised years ago to tell how to do this with ResEdit, but as > far as I know, has never done so) Indeed they have; in a recent software supplement, and in the MPW C and Pascal documents, the methods are documented. I see no reason to reinvent the wheel by throwing in trash like drawing facilities and text editors, when those tools already exist; the dedicated drawing program will always give better results than something that's added into a resource editor. Jazz is a good example of such failure. -Rich
larryha@tekig5.TEK.COM (Larry Hattery) (04/26/88)
If only LightspeedC would provide a resource editor. THINK has done a nice job of integrating the programming environment, but they've omitted a very important piece by not including a resource editor. Other machines have no concept of resources, but resources are the soul of the Macintosh and should be supported within any complete environment. LightspeedC 4.0??? I recently had a chance to play with "Prototyper" from Smethers & Barnes at a local computer store, and it seems like a much better way to create resources. It's actually more than a resource editor, it also generates the source for an application skeleton to go along with those resources. It currently only supports Pascal however, which makes the code generation useless as far as I'm concerned (C hack that I am). The dealer said that a new version that supports C is supposed to be out in July, so I think I'll wait and see if they pull that off before I buy. The price is supposed to go up to $175 when that release comes out, which seems pretty steep to me for a product that's competing with a number of free programs. Hopefully, the mail order houses will get hold of it soon (no one has heard of it yet) and the price will drop under $100 where it should be. Prototyper provides a way of "running" the interface so it can be seen and played with before you write any application code. This should make it much easier to develop interfaces for both new and ported applications. It supports all the common resource types needed for an application. Well, at least as far as I could tell. I'm don't sure if it created the ICON, FREF, BNDL set or not. But it does do windows, dialogs, and menus, and supports a full set of dialog items including lists. All in all, it's worth looking at, and maybe worth buying if the support is there. While I'm on the subject, does anyone know of a utility that creates a resource.h file that associates named resources with their resources IDs. I know, I could just use GetNamedResource to find the ID, but if such a tool exists it would make life a little easier. -- Larry E. Hattery Tektronix Inc. larryha@penguin.PEN.TEK.COM M/S 47-704 Portable Instruments Division PO Box 500 (503)627-1225 days Beaverton, OR 97077