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: resorcerer@mathemaesthetics.com
Website: http://www.mathemaesthetics.com
FREE RESORCERER 2.2 UPDATE
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
Doug McKenna
Mathemaesthetics, Inc.
PO Box 298
Boulder CO 80306-0298 USA
email: resorcerer@mathemaesthetics.com
website: www.mathemaesthetics.com
vox: (303) 440-0707
fax: (303) 440-0504