WDEF identifiers

[stephen barncard]

I haven't heard the term WDEF in a while...I don't think runrev windows are
based on that.

MacOS X  doesn't use Resource Forks anymore...

Runrev can read and write resources though, as long as Apple doesn't
disallow them entirely in the file system - it's a legacy thing.

As long as the forked files stays in the Mac world, resources might be
useful, like adding extra data to a JPG or sound file. But I would question
if Apple will support it in the future, and the modified files might not be
happy on other systems.

Personally, I loved the resource concept - like custom properties, images
and sounds we imbed today in Rev - but it made a mess of incompatibility
which impression lingers today:  "aww it's a mac file, no wonder it's messed
up".

Search a well-used PC drive for ".DS_store" files, which always showed up in
a directory of mac files on a PC. There must be billions of files today with
that name. File conversion systems, not knowing what else to do with the
resource forks would split them with the data forks, leaving the data in the
file and moving whatever data was in the resource forks of all the files
into the single ".DS_store" garbage heap. I don't know if any of the data in
there is recoverable.

I just had to shut down spotlight. I did a search for ".DS_Store" and
stopped it because there were so many on my machine and adding them to the
list so quickly that I was worried it might actually top it out.

If you search for them, use "File Visibility" as a criteria (which will have
to be added by using "other" from the "kind" popup.

I'm guessing that MacOS is tolerating the 'dual system' approach but that
resource fork laden files might appear to have the resources exist in the
file but also 'virtualized' to appear in the MacOSX system properly.

Here's the best poop on .DS_Store

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.DS_Store



On 12 June 2010 06:42, Simon Lord <slord at karbonized.com> wrote:

> Has anyone ever successfully used a WDEF identifier?  Is there a list
> of available identifiers somewhere or do we still have to manually
> look at the app resource and then set it in RunRev?
>
-- 
-------------------------
Stephen Barncard
San Francisco