[ANN] Free Resorcerer 2.2 Update Available
Doug McKenna
PRESS RELEASE -- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Editor's Contact:
Doug McKenna
Mathemaesthetics, Inc.
PO Box 298, Boulder, CO 80306 USA
(303) 440-0707 (vox) (303) 440-0504 (fax)
Email: resor...@mathemaesthetics.com
Website: http://www.mathemaesthetics.com
FREE RESORCERER 2.2 UPDATE
--------------------------
Premiere Mac OS Resource Editor Adds Support for Appearance Manager
Controls, Alias Editing, Single-Instruction PowerPC Disassembly, Voodoo™
Source Code Control for File Comparison Scripting, and More.
BOULDER, COLORADO, USA: Mathemaesthetics, Inc. has released a new
version of Resorcerer, its PowerPC native replacement resource editor
for Apple Computer's venerable ResEdit.
"We continue to enhance Resorcerer with both Apple- and
developer-requested features," said Doug McKenna, president of
Mathemaesthetics, Inc. "It has been gratifying for us that new sales of
this important Mac OS development tool for the first five months of 1998
have been significantly better than the sales of new copies were during
much of 1997. This signals a healthier future for the Mac software
development market after an unfortunate period of confusion. Now that
Apple has committed to including the Resource Manager API in its
long-term Mac OS X ("Carbon") strategy, we fully expect to continue
supporting Resorcerer for the benefit of Mac OS developers and
localizers."
Besides the usual bug fixes, Resorcerer 2.2 improves upon version 2.0 in
several areas:
Appearance Control Editing
--------------------------
Foremost among its new features is enhanced WYSIWYG interface layout
editing for Mac OS 8 Appearance Manager controls in its Dialog Editor.
These controls are the interface elements that Apple has defined on
behalf of developers so that Mac applications can display themselves in
a consistent fashion, especially when users switch themes. Resorcerer
now edits and displays the standard public controls defined in Apple's
Appearance Mgr 1.02 SDK. The Dialog Editor also goes to great lengths to
keep controls from misbehaving in the face of missing related resources,
and provides, for instance, auto-sizing for those controls that don't
implement the feature themselves. Should Apple introduce new controls,
the Editor will have the ability to enable or disable support for new
controls on an individual basis.
Single-Instruction PowerPC Disassembly to English
-------------------------------------------------
The 2.2 update further adds a major enhancement to Resorcerer's
repertoire of tools. Mathemaesthetics, Inc. has developed a new PowerPC
disassembler that not only disassembles to the usual assembly language
instructions that programmers try to be familiar with, but each
instruction also gets translated into a complete English paragraph of
text, tailored to explain the operation of each instruction and its
numeric or symbolic operands. The new disassembler has been incorporated
into Resorcerer's interactive 32-bit Value Converter, and is expected to
be deployed in a full-blown PowerPC code editor in a later upgrade. All
instructions, including extended mnemonics, defined in IBM's PowerPC
Architecture are supported; AltiVec (specialized multimedia vector
instructions in PowerPC G4 machines) support, as well as localizable
output, is expected in a later upgrade.
For example, the new disassembler displays the PowerPC instruction with
hex value 0x54502D19 not only as
rlwinm. r16,RTOC,5,20,12
but can also optionally output a complete explanation, as in
Rotate Left Word Immediate then AND with Mask and Record
--------------------------------------------------------
Rotate contents of RTOC left by 5 bits; build mask of 1's
with bits 12-20 set to 0 (0xFFF007FF); then set r16 to the
rotated bits AND'ed with the mask, and record <, >, and =
conditions in cr0.
"The new Value Converter disassembler is awesome!" says Devon Hubbard of
Onyx Software, makers of QC and Spotlight debugging tools. "It's been so
handy in looking at disassembly listings and figuring out exactly what's
going on without having to leaf through IBM/Motorola PowerPC manuals all
the time."
Alias Editing
-------------
As a result of the requests of many developers, Resorcerer 2.2 has a new
plug-in apprentice editor for editing alias records (resources of type
'alis'), which are used in many places in the Mac OS, such as within
Finder alias files, as well as within application files. Public alias
information can be viewed, re-targeted, updated, and DeRez'ed.
Voodoo™-Compatible File Comparison for Source Code Control
----------------------------------------------------------
Rounding out the list of new Resorcerer 2.2 features is its
Voodoo™-compatible AppleEvent scripting support for file comparison.
Voodoo versions 1.8.1v3 or later will be able to take advantage of the
new feature.
"We are especially happy that the new version of Resorcerer now extends
the list of VOODOO-aware compare tools and plug-ins and can thus be used
from inside VOODOO to compare different versions of files on a resource
basis," says Christoph Reichenberger, VOODOO product manager at UNI
SOFTWARE PLUS.
Further information about VOODOO can be found at
http://www.unisoft.co.at/products/voodoo.html
Other New Features
------------------
Other new Resorcerer 2.2 features include preliminary (non-graphic)
support for building Allegro (System 8.5) icon suites ('icns'
resources), as recently demonstrated at the Apple WorldWide Developers
Conference; the addition of certain CodeWarrior-compatible keyboard
shortcuts; and other minor sundries and amusement.
Update Information
------------------
Resorcerer 2.0 users can update their copies to version 2.2 using the
free updaters available on Mathemaesthetics' website at the URL...
http://www.mathemaesthetics.com/Res22Info.html
Updaters for the PowerPC native, 68K, and fat versions of Resorcerer 2
are available. Each updater requires a copy of the original Resorcerer
2.0 distribution CD to be able to install version 2.2.
Registered users of earlier 1.x versions can upgrade to version 2.2 for
$88, and can do so using ordering software available on the company
website.
A free demo version of Resorcerer 2.2 is also available on the company's
website.
About Mathemaesthetics, Inc.
----------------------------
Mathemaesthetics, Inc. is a privately-held 10-year-old Macintosh
software development company, currently specializing in developer tools.
Founded in 1988 by Douglas McKenna, the word "mathemaesthetics" is
intended to connote the melding of art and math, both of which are
necessary for great interactive software.
About Resorcerer
----------------
The company's flagship product, Resorcerer, is a powerful and friendly
resource editor, data file editor, and general Mac OS file system
browser. It has replaced Apple's aging ResEdit, which Apple has not
updated since 1994, in most professional Mac OS developers' collection
of development tools.
Resorcerer is PowerPC native and supports a very general plug-in
architecture for adding "apprentice" data editors from third parties.
The product is shipped with dedicated editors for creating and
maintaining most of the common Mac OS resource types that developers and
localizers need to edit to create Mac software. MacUser Magazine has
named Resorcerer the "premiere resource editor on the Macintosh", and
the product has won several industry awards, including MacUser's Eddy
Award.