ResEdit replacement

On 1/19/07, Phil Emery <philfocusedcreative.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> Being a Geek from the bad old days of System 6, I became quite fond
> of opening up applications with ResEdit (or other such programs) and
> tweaking the UI to my liking (changing font style and line spacing
> and such).
>
> I'm finding that I don't like a lot of the approaches that modern
> Apps take in terms of file lists and would like to be able to tweak a
> few things (i.e Transmit and Thunderbird).
>
> Any ideas on how one does these things these days?


Interface Builder, for modern Cocoa applications.

On 19-Jan-2007, at 10:45, Phil Emery wrote:
> Being a Geek from the bad old days of System 6, I became quite fond
> of opening up applications with ResEdit (or other such programs) and
> tweaking the UI to my liking (changing font style and line spacing
> and such).
>
> I'm finding that I don't like a lot of the approaches that modern
> Apps take in terms of file lists and would like to be able to tweak a
> few things (i.e Transmit and Thunderbird).
>
> Any ideas on how one does these things these days?

Most applications (but not Thunderbird really, or firefox) are
bundles. You rclick the app and "Show bundle" and then you can
cruise the .nib files and various other files. The Mozilla apps have
the vast majority of their content "cemented" into a single binary
file (which is why the Universal version is twice the size of the PPC
version while Safari Universal is actually SMALLER than the PPC
version was).

To really play with the nib files and such, you will need to have
installed the Developer Tools.

--
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but not a lot. And the chorus goes like this...

At 09.45 -0800 2007-01-19, Phil Emery wrote:
>Any ideas on how one does these things these days?

I know you're looking for other ways to tweak the UI of apps these days and this is not exactly an answer to your question, but one OS X replacement for ResEdit that is free, scriptable and looks pretty nice is Rezilla
http://perso.orange.fr/bdesgraupes/DocHTML/rezilla.html


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Thunderbird and Firefox use a system called XUL to define their UI. It's XML, with element appearances specified with CSS and behaviours specified with JavaScript. Installing an extension is the usual way to add some XUL that modifies the app's default UI.