ResEdit
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| Developer(s) | Apple Computer |
|---|---|
| Stable release |
2.1.3 / August 1994
|
| Development status | Discontinued |
| Operating system | Classic Mac OS |
| Type | Software development tool |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | Mac OS 8 and 9 Developer Documentation: ResEdit |
ResEdit is a discontinued developer tool application for the Apple Macintosh, used to create and edit resources directly in the Mac's resource fork architecture. It is an alternative to tools such as REdit, and the resource compiler Rez. For the average user, ResEdit is generally easier to use, because it uses a graphical user interface. Although it had been intended to be a developer tool, power users often use it to edit icons, menus, and other elements of an application's GUI, customizing it to their own preferences.
Resources on the Macintosh can be of many different types, and in fact any arbitrary data can be turned into a resource. While the system defines many standard formats for particular kinds of resources (for example, an icon, or a window template), programmers are also free to define their own. ResEdit includes support for editing many of the standard types and for creating arbitrary resources with any structure a programmer saw fit.
ResEdit is one of the earliest examples of a GUI layout tool, an essential component for rapid application development. For example, the classic Mac OS defines a standard resource called a dialog template and a dialog items list (resource types 'DLOG' and 'DITL' respectively). In ResEdit, it's possible to simply create these types and add GUI elements to them in an almost WYSIWYG 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 can create a functional dialog box using the stored resource data which matches the appearance you lay out in ResEdit. While hardly a revolutionary concept today, when ResEdit first appeared in the mid-1980s, this was a considerable innovation. 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.
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