Interfaces

Resources (.rsrc) files are leftovers from the old days. Carbon apps often have them. iTunes is Carbon.

Resorcerer is a commercial editor for these files.

There are shareware and OSS apps out there, but you should google for them yourself. Try something like "resource editor"+"OS X".

Interface Builder is the only app for editing .nib files.

In addition to a GUI editor like Resorcerer, in the /Developer/Tools folder installed with Xcode Tools are some command line utilities for working with resources. The "DeRez" tool will convert a resource file into it's text equivalent (a ".r" file) while the "Rez" tool will convert a textual ".r" file back to a resource file. So, you can use DeRez to convert your .rsrc file into a text file, tinker with it in a text editor, then use Rez to convert your modified data back to a .rsrc file.

There are a ton of options for these tools, but they both have man pages.

I've only used these tools a few times in OS X, but there were pre-OS X versions that came with the MPW development environment that were fairly widely used. I believe Xcode probably contains rules for "compiling" .r files during it's build process because some of the example code contains .r files.

One problem with using these tools is that the format of the various resource types can differ pretty widely and you might have some trouble finding or understanding the formats. Search for .r files on your system and you'll likely be able to track down some of the system related resource format descriptions.

Steve