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Comment by rezmason | Hacker News Reader

As an early Macintosh tool, ResEdit's UI was intuitive enough for non-programmers to pick it up and apply superficial changes to the images, sounds, UI layouts, strings and level save files of the Mac apps of their time.

Nowadays I can't even swap out the icon file of a Mac app without it running aground on the notarization stuff in modern versions of the OS. The age of ResEdit is as dead as a dogcow.

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And before I found ResEdit the software package I used came with a tool called "RMaker". You fed it a .r text file with a very terse format for describing the various resources and it generated the resource (.rsrc) file.

I even edited 'icon' resources in .r files ... maybe some kind of array of hex values? Christ, that was tedious.

And then I found ResEdit....

(At least in my foggy memory that is how I remember things.)

Tedious indeed, but for a long time it was the only game in town.

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

I remember in older versions of OS X how cool it was you could just get info an app, drag an icon on top, and it would have a new icon. Guess that had to go at some point :/

Well, that still works! (Just confirmed it in Big Sur.)

Did you do the floppy-disk-full-of-icons thing in elementary school too?

I was envious of my friends who had collected so many Calvin & Hobbes and Simpsons icons.

It's like punk rockers wearing badges, but nerdier.

> as dead as a dogcow

Thank you for the simile -- so much more apt than a dodo, in this case!

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