Icons on OS X

[Richard Gaskin]

Troy Rollins wrote:

> Richard's instructions are good, but I find it a real shame that as much
> as Rev does for you along the way - it leaves you in the lurch for this
> very crucial stage. You can do practically everything from within the
> environment - and then when it comes time to distribute, out comes the
> cryptic pList editor...
> 
> ResEdit is NOT a good choice under OSX, it is REALLY showing it age now,
> and is ill prepared to deal with bundles. The plist editor supplied with
> apple development tools is OK for this, but something is still
> missing... perhaps a step by step recipe. Ken Ray gave us some good
> insights a while back, but unfortunately, once you start to tear apart
> the Rev build, it gets pretty ugly. The really sad part is that we found
> editing the Windows registry using the Transcript tools FAR easier than
> getting the same functions to work in OSX - but of course, Rev provides
> no real help there.

I wish it were in place right now as well, and I understand they're working
on adding a more streamlined build process ASAP.

Given that the resource fork is on the way out and that the 'plst' spec has
already changed at least once, I'm patient.    After all, the Windows
registry has been around a long time, and the spec is stable and widely
documented (even O'Reily has a good registry book), so we would expect the
support for that to be more mature.

It's not hard to modify the plst -- it's just text, in self-documenting XML.
The only tool you need is Simpletext (or the OS X equivalent).

If Apple's ResEdit is crashing on your system, could that be related to
whatever's causing Iconographer to crash?  I've had good luck with ResEdit
in the penalty box - er, compatibiity layer. :)

And if you really want to simplify things you could take a few minutes and
write your own plst editor:

on mouseUp
  answer file "Select an app:"
  if it is empty then exit to top
  put GetResource(it,"plst",0)
end mouseUp

There's also a corresponding SetResource to put the data back when you're
done.

I'm not suggesting that Rev forces you to write your own resource editor
just to build a standalone.  You can do it today using the tools Apple gives
us for this interim method, and meanwhile Rev is working on a longer-term
solution.

For my own work, their priorities have been useful. The things I truly need
from them are the things I can't do on my own; the rest are nice to have,
but less essential to me.  Everyone's mileage varies, of course, depending
on the nature of their work.

So until the Rev folks give me a one-click build for all platforms, I've
found modifying the plst to be acceptably simple and quick: just use ResEdit
and SimpleText; you just do it just once for each product version you make
and don't think about it in between.

-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
 Fourth World Media Corporation
 Custom Software and Web Development for All Major Platforms
 Developer of WebMerge 2.0: Publish any database on any site
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