Re: Resources (was: MS-DOS FST)

[jon@qedbbs.com (Jonathan Fether)]

I'm posting this for a dude who emailed me (Can't he post for himself?).
Date: Mon, 10 May 93 11:21:52 EST
From: tkav@allgfx.agi.oz.au (Tony Kavadias)
Subject: Re: Resources (was: MS-DOS FST)
 
> Granted, Andy is a great programmer, but disk swapping to run GSHK is 
too
> much on my (God send me a hard drive) patience. And I thought the HFS 
FST
> would let me read those MAC resource forks and put my "GS IS THE BEST
> icons in the computers across the street (The dude who runs them is a
> mac-freak).
 
 
About the GS reading Mac icons... if the GS can't associate a Mac 
document
with a GS application, or since a GS cannot run a Mac application, why 
should
the GS even tell you that it knows what the Mac file is?  One idea of the
Finder is to associate documents to applications.  Since the GS can't
associate any Mac documents to GS applications (yet), then the GS shows
"plain paper" document icons to reflect that fact.
 
This stupid flame war was on before, except that resources didn't exist 
for
GS/OS then.  And the above paragraph of information put out a lot of 
flames!
 
But the same case still holds... resources or not!
 
On the GS before resources existed... things were not as automatic.  If 
you
have installed, say, AppleWorks GS's icon file in the Icons folder, 
without
actually having the application itself installed, then the IIGS Finder 
would
still display your icons.  Good?  Well, not really!  If you try to launch
AppleWorks GS by double-clicking on a document icon, the Finder would 
fail
in its search, replying that the application could not be found.
 
Having icons in resources along with the application file itself will 
prevent
this problem from happening - if the application is genuinely on your 
system,
then the icons will appear to indicate this.  This is what happens on a
Mac (sorry I swore!) - and the Mac does this without flaw because of the
"locking" association between an application file and its icon resources.
 
Of course many pre-System 6 applications will have to be modified to use 
icon
resources rather than icon files to make the Finder operate more 
consistently,
but for those new applications that conform to System 6 guidelines, it 
makes
the Apple IIGS System 6 more truthful in evaluating what you can and 
can't
do at the Finder.
 
This serves as one of the strongest arguments for having a file system 
where
GS/OS files can have two forks.  It all happened by design on the 
Macintosh,
and works well.  It can also work well on the Apple IIGS, because of the
similarity between the Macintosh and IIGS operating systems.  Because a 
file
and its resources can never be separated (compare this with the use of
separate hidden resource files in Windows 3), then the 
icon-to-application
association can never be split, and hence, the Finder cannot lie.
 
The Macintosh Finder takes advantage of this distinct feature rather 
well...
but applications can do similar things if they choose to implement it.  
And
now, the Apple IIGS Finder can take advantage of this distinct feature as 
well,
just as well!
 
I ask you to post this on the board on my behalf... it'll shut up a lot 
of
people - especially those who are against the idea of resources!
 
Whadda you say to this?
 
 
--- Tony Kavadias
        tkav@allgfx.agi.oz.au
 

(C) People for the Apple IIgs, Ink.
Jon Fether                 thisnet: jon@qedbbs.com (Fast)
May John Sculley be killed cheapnet:jon@qed.cts.com
by one of his own! (Macs!) TEAM-NET:#32@TA