Converting Resources

The Goldenseal Pro app now runs, but it doesn’t get very far, yet.

The code starts out by loading info about the fields in each type of record.  The data is used for many things, so we grab it first thing, and keep it permanently in RAM for better performance.

On older Macs, Goldenseal got that info from Mac resources, which also stored all text, menus, window layouts, and other program data.  Anyone could edit the resources with ResEdit, and one user actually used it to translate everything into Spanish.  The Windows and OS X Carbon versions could read the same resources, but didn’t have any way to modify them.

These days, both Mac Cocoa and Windows store resource data as XML (similar to HTML).  So we are currently writing code that will move most of our existing resources into that format.  The conversion will save a lot of typing, and eliminate errors.

Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
Turtle Creek Software

Author: Dennis Kolva

Programming Director for Turtle Creek Software. Design & planning of accounting and estimating software.