Standard Macintosh Toolbox C Boilerplate Code to help kick-start your own profitable career in Macintosh 68k or PPC Development

classic codewarrior macintosh macos-classic motorola-68020 os9 powerpc ppc

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James Robert Perih 470c33a4db Package resource file resource fork, and update readme.		2019-03-12 23:04:19 -06:00
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MacBoilerplate.c	Set window title. Once I understood what a Pascal String was, it was easy.	2019-03-12 22:45:18 -06:00
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MacBoilerplate.µ	Set window title. Once I understood what a Pascal String was, it was easy.	2019-03-12 22:45:18 -06:00
README.md	Package resource file resource fork, and update readme.	2019-03-12 23:04:19 -06:00
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README.md

Macintosh Toolbox C Boilerplate

What is a Macintosh Toolbox?

Yeah, it's what we all coded against in the 90's on the Macintosh. Well, except me. I was still watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and eating breakfast cereal, so I didn't have the capacity to be developing for such systems at the time. But, I'm doing it now!

Macintosh Toolbox refers to a set of API's available to C, C++ and Pascal developers, in order to ensure their applications ran as expected on a Macintosh 68k through to the PowerPC. Later revisions of the macOS utilized a Cocoa layer which replaced Macintosh Toolbox.

What's this code?

This code is an example of the boilerplate code required to bootstrap even the most basic of programs for the Macintosh. Discussion to follow.

What does this do?

Right now, not much:

We start up the app, initialize, and enter an event loop.
On receiving certain events, we handle them.

How to use it?

This code requires Metrowerks CodeWarrior 7.1+ to run; open the MacBoilerplate.µ project file. If you're using a different version of Metrowerks, you may need to just junk the project file, create a new project, and include the .c and .rsrc files.

A note about resource forks

Go figure; ResEdit stores the resources in the .rsrc file, in the resource fork. Therefore, Git doesn't see it. So, I have packaged the rsrc file with ditto, and written scripts to package (package-resources.sh) and unpackage (unpackage-resources.sh) the resource file. You can also verify that the file still contains the resources by running verify-resources.sh.

This requires ditto, which should be installed on macOS, as well as DeRez, which comes part of Xcode Tools.

TODO

Some things I'm going to be adding (because it's not actually complete, yet, and I don't know how ot do these things):

~~Menu~~ Done!
Controls
File System access
~~Alerts~~ Done!
Buttons and Button handlers
Keyboard Shortcuts
Network access

Contributing

Please do. For heaven's sake, yes. But, also please clear your line-endings on any text files to be Unix-like.