Managing Classic Mac OS resources inResEdit

The Macintosh was intended to be different in many ways. One of them was its file system, which was designed for each file to consist of two forks, one a regular data fork as in normal file systems, the other a structured database of resources, the resource fork.

Resources came to be used to store a lot of standard structured data, such as the specifications for and contents of alerts and dialogs, menus, collections of text strings, keyboard definitions and layouts, icons, windows, fonts, and chunks of code to be used by apps. You could extend the types of resource supported by means of a template, itself stored as a resource, so developers could define new resource types appropriate to their own apps.

Howard Oakley

And using ResEdit, a tool developed by Apple, you could manipulate the various resources to your heart's content. I never used the classic Mac OS when it was current, and only play with it as a retro platform every now and then, so I ever used ResEdit when it was the cool thing to do. Looking back, though, and learning more about it, it seems like just another awesome capability that Apple lost along the way towards modern Apple.

Perhaps I should load up on my old Macs and see with my own eyes what I can do with ResEdit.