A full PowerPC Disassembler library has been built, based on the information in IBM's The PowerPC Architecture - A Specification for a New Family of RISC Microprocessors. Unlike Apple's, this disassembler not only disassembles the usual way (to assembly instructions, duh), but also (optionally) delivers two extra strings for disassembling to readable English. The first string is a de-acronymized version of the opcode, to remind you of what it means (since PPC "mnemonics" (mnot!) are a crime against humanity); the second string is a complete English translation of the entire instruction and its effects on the machine state, tailored to whatever arguments the opcode takes, including symbolic register name substitution. Currently the disassembler library has been added to the Value Converter for debugging and educational purposes, and will be deployed in a new PPC code editor in a later upgrade.
Alias Editor
There is a new apprentice plug-in editor for alias resources ('alis'). The editor displays as much public information as the Alias Manager documents (the internal structure of 'alis' resources is officially undocumented and subject to change), and allows you to choose a new target file, folder, or volume for the alias. The Update button lets you update the information in the 'alis' by asking the Alias Manager to search on the same volume as the 'alis' has encoded inside it. Option-clicking on the Update button does the search on all mounted volumes. Alias resources contain AliasRecords, which contain their own size so that extra user-specified data can be appended past the end of the AliasRecord. The editor does not make such extra data available for editing, but does maintain it if it finds any. If nothing is selected in the signature field of the editor, you can choose Copy from the Edit menu to DeRez the alias data as hex. The editor has balloon help for its various widgets, and when you open an alias it will automatically tell you if the Alias Manager thinks it needs updating.
Dialog Editor Appearance Support
The Dialog Editor is now showing Appearance Controls (only the ones defined in v1.02 headers) while you're laying them out, and supports them much more robustly during TryOut mode. When special helper resources, such as 'tab#' or 'cicn' resources are missing from the same file in which they are referenced (from the CNTL), the editor attempts to educate you visually about the situation. Support for embedding or groups of embedded resources is not yet done.
The Use Best Size command in the Item menu, when applied to Control items that reference Appearance Mgr controls, now calls the control to answer the question (via GetBestControlRect). As of this writing (Appearance 1.02), most controls don't answer this question and consequently do nothing, so we've made assumptions about what the right answers are and apply them if the control says it doesn't support delivering its "best" size. Hopefully, later versions of Appearance will do a better job, especially once there are multiple themes.
Miscellaneous New Features
The About Box has been "click-enhanced", corporate-logo-wise. This is very likely the first time that a new mathematical discovery (several thousand brand-new fractal space-filling curves) has been initially "published" in a software product's About Box.
The 'PPob' SHOW code resource, which is called upon to display the object's class in the Resources List of the File Window, now knows about the 100 or so classes supported as of December 97 (circa CW Pro 2).
CMD-D (Discard) and CMD-S (Save) now work in various Save Your Work/Discard Changes alerts, à la CodeWarrior.
When doing screen copying for a new 'PICT' (CMD-Shift-P), you can now tap the 'w' key to resize the marching ants marque on the desktop to whatever the proper size is for taking a picture of the entire frontmost window. Very useful for creating illustrated SimpleText files, yes?
Added a template for 'TMPL' resources, which has been curiously missing all these years.
Added a filtered template for the new Allegro (System 8.2) icon suite resource, 'icns'. Full scale pixel editing for the new icon formats is in the works, but not done yet for this version.
The splash screen and initial Ask for File to Open dialog are now suppressed when Resorcerer is launched in the background, for better use of Resorcerer under scripting situations, of which there are almost none right now.
File comparison is now scriptable with a new compare Apple event. The event takes two required arguments, a "newer file" and an "older file", and returns an optional boolean answer (true if different). This was implemented in a manner compatible with Voodoo. Some simple scripts demonstrating the syntax are:
tell application "Resorcerer® 2.2"
compare newer file "LatestVersion.rsrc" older file "PreviousVersion.rsrc" with return differences
set anyDifferences to result
end tell
or to leave the pair of different files open...
tell application "Resorcerer® 2.2"
compare newer file "A Test2.rsrc" older file "A Test1.rsrc" with show differences and return differences
set anyDifferences to result
end tell
Bugs Fixed since 2.0
• After copying resources from a file and pasting them into another, sometimes Resorcerer would get confused trying to display the resources in the clipboard still available for the next paste. Sometimes it would get really, really confused. The confusion level is now significantly lowered, and Resorcerer has recovered nicely after a day's worth of debugging therapy. The application is now (in) a work-release program.
• Right hand File System Browser pane (showing individual file, folder, or volume attributes) no longer is hardwired to geneva initially, but now properly starts up using the small system font.
• Fixed a crash in the StringList Editor when tabbing to the next string when there is no next string. Also fixed a Next/Prev button hiliting problem.
• Fixed a bug that would not cause the Folder Info Editor to stay open after saving a name change but not other information changes.
• Fixed some minor procID problems in the Control Editor's procID popup. It was using the wrong (swapped or off-by-1) procIDs for Tab Groups and Secondary Control Group Boxes.
• Fixed a crash caused by choosing Resource Info when certain resource editors were the front window (like the color icon editor) and the resource(s) was newly created. To get the Resource Info windows for a new resource being edited, you have to open the window(s) from the File Window.
• Modified the code that tests for floating windows during scrolling of underlying windows so as to do the right thing with respect to clipping.
• Copied the SIZE -1 resource from the PPC version into the 68K version.
• Got rid of some extraneous resources (Mcmd, DLGX, TMPL) and stripped some extra resource names that were unnecessary in the shipping version.
• Apprentices implemented as Dialogs are now properly passed to DialogSelect if the Activate ApprenticeMethod is implemented and returns the kEdPassBuckMsg error code after doing whatever activation stuff it wants.
• Now computing the proper checksum in the 'ckid' resource when overriding the Read-Only attribute on file open.
• Value Converter now uses standard system window frame.
• Fixed a bug in the 'PPob' shower code resource that was incorrectly displaying portions of the object class name.
• Added a new flag bit to the 'scsz' (script size) resource
• Fixed an apprentice folder scanning bug that sometimes skipped the "Private Apprentices" folder.
• Fixed a bug in the Hex Editor that would cause a crash when bringing up the Searcher dialog window.
• Brought the Dialog Editor Starter Code generator more up to snuff.
• 68K disassembler was incorrectly disassembling long negative displacement offsets, such as found in the 68020 bsr instruction.
• The 'STR#' Editor now Prints to Text.
• Does a better job of cleaning up temporary files, which was causing problems in the Dialog Editor during Try Out.
• The Control Editor now properly marks the data dirty when you change a bevel button's content resource type.
• The Try Out command in the Dialog Editor would crash whenever a dialog contained a Popup User item (which is only needed for dialogs that have to run under System 6) whose item number preceded an Okay button's item number. This has been fixed.
• The Control Editor now does a better job labeling the three control parameters depending on the procID (e.g. so you don't have to remember which parameter represents the number of ticks in a slider, etc.)
• Fixed a bug in the PICT template for opcode $0099 in color pictures that was misparsing the special temporary PixMap/BitMap key the filter inserts and deletes.
• If a plug-in apprentice editor mis-supplied a 'STR#' with Undo Strings to the Editor manager, the Editor manager would call GetIndString to retrieve the undo command string, which would get returned empty, and then it would install the string as the Undo item (item 1) in the Edit menu. Because the string is empty, and 'MENU' resource command lists end implicitly with a 0 byte, this has the effect of deleting all subsequent items from the edit menu, thereby making it disappear. The Editor Manager is now doing a better reality check on this situation.
• The File Window and other portions of Resorcerer that display 'PICT' resources do a much better job of not passing a privately compressed 'PICT' data handle to DrawPicture(), the doing of which invariable crashes and burns. The Picture Editor now alerts you if it finds such a PICT, basically to tell you why it's not drawing anything.
• Fixed a bizarre and nasty bug that would "randomly" freeze the machine when you attempted to open a locked file. Turned out not to be totally random, but dependent on the position of your mouse during a button click. Don't ask; don't tell :)
