Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!lfcs!nick From: nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Nick Rothwell) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer Subject: Re: Design Philosophy Message-ID: <493@etive.ed.ac.uk> Date: 7 Jul 88 12:50:14 GMT References: <434@dogie.edu> <13346@apple.Apple.COM> Reply-To: nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Nick Rothwell) Organization: Laboratory for the Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh U Lines: 36 In article <13346@apple.Apple.COM> lsr@apple.apple.com.UUCP (Larry Rosenstein) writes: >In article <434@dogie.edu> terranova@vms.macc.wisc.edu writes: > >> A friend of mine recently expressed his disapproval of the standard >>Macintosh program design. Rather than putting windows, menus, icons, >>def procs, strings, controls, etc. in resources he would prefer to >>hard code everything into the program and make heavy use of #define >>statements. He would change the #defines instead of the resources. >>"That's why they made the preprocessor." > >The main motivation for using resources was to allow programs to be >customized for international markets without recompiling them. > ... and others ... Surely a better reason is that you can use development tools to build these parts of your application, instead of having to do it by hand. If you want you program to have some icons, then fire up an icon builder, draw it, and paste it in as a resource. Ditto for pictures, characters, ... I wrote a synth voicing program for my old computer, and it required 32 intricate pictures of connected boxes containing numbers (DX7 algorithms, some of you might guess...). And I had to generate the bitmaps BY HAND! It took hours and hours. Had I a bitmap application, or MacDraw or something, that would have been a few minutes, and they would have been better, and I would have had the option to move/change/resize them. You wanna build all your graphical entities using #define and hex?? Be my guest... > Larry Rosenstein, Object Specialist Nick Rothwell, Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh. nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk!mcvax!ukc!lfcs!nick ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ...while the builders of the cages sleep with bullets, bars and stone, they do not see your road to freedom that you build with flesh and bone.