Two important phenomenons have grown out of the San Francisco Bay area in the past 30 years: the hippie/counterculture/protest movement and Silicon Valley.
At the People’s Republic of Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco, the two have become one and, joined with Macintosh, have ascended to a higher plane of coolness in the form of the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group. Boasting more than 11,000 members in at least 50 nations around our planet, BMUG is mostly famous for its twice-yearly “newsletter,” which actually is a 400-page journal combining low- and high-end computing with important social and legal commentary.
Last year at the San Francisco Macworld Expo, I stopped by the BMUG booth, paid my dues, picked up my tie-dye T-shirt and found a little 80-page book about ResEdit, Apple Computer’s often-dangerous, ultimately mysterious resource editor.
While the first effort of Zen and the Art of Resource Editing wasn’t a bad try, the book left a lot to be desired — mostly substance. It was shallow in areas, a bit raw and was geared toward the newest of Macintosh owners.
While I favored Zen over Apple’s own ResEdit Reference, I much preferred ResEdit Complete by Peter Alley and Carolyn Strange (Addison-Wesley).
What I did appreciate about Zen was its attitude. Basically, your Mac is supposed to be your Mac. And it won’t be until you make it so with ResEdit.
Well, another year rolled around and this past January, on my annual pilgrimage to ’Frisco and Macworld Expo, I discovered an all-new Zen.
In the 12 months since its first release, the class-skipping Berkeley students who wrote the original book were hard at work. Now in its third edition, Zen is a robust 222 pages and includes a disk full of cool resources and editors (I liked the fact that, unlike many books that include disks, I didn’t have to pay extra for shareware or freeware programs available from my local users group; ResEdit 2.1.1 is not included).
With the new edition comes changes.
First is its distributor: Peachpit Press. This little publishing house is fast becoming a Macintosh powerhouse and picking up BMUG’s latest only strengthens its position. However, it’s appears obvious that Peachpit’s role is mostly hands-off — I found typos, misspellings and grammatical problems not evident in other Peachpit Press projects.
Second is price: $24.95 (up from $20). A good investment? That depends on how hip you want your Mac to become.
From its newly designed cover, Zen oozes with counterculture coolness. Open the book and find the foreword by Cliff Stoll, the Berkeley hippie/computer guru who caught, cornered and captured a German KGB spy ring. He later chronicled those adventures in the best-selling book, The Cuckoo’s Egg.
In Zen, Stoll reveals the attitude necessary to take full advantage of ResEdit: “I was in the Bay Area for a while, so I stopped in at a BMUG meeting and picked up a copy of the book. I took it home that night and began to play with it. Gadzooks! I had never known that any of this could be possible! Reading through this book, I spent that entire night modifying my menus, changing my Trash and editing dialogs to say all sorts of properly cool things.”
At this past Expo, I met Stoll. He really does talk like that.
The new Zen is improved in just about every area. The layout is cleaner, the writing is brighter and the ideas are better. The third edition covers System 7 (remember, it wasn’t out when the first edition appeared) and the BMUG folks have found all kinds of cool stuff to do to it with ResEdit.
But don’t think BMUG has gone Establishment Yuppie on us. Far from it.
Zen is a gritty, tell-it-like-it-is, Berkeley-attitude volume. The Hacker Ethic lives and breathes through its pages. Like the twice-annual newsletter, not all of the words are correctly spelled and some sentences tend to rub high-browed grammarians raw, but it only, perhaps, adds to the charm.
The authors even recommend the competing ResEdit Complete for more advanced users. That is the essence of the Hacker Ethic.
While at Expo, I met with Zen’s primary author, Derrick Schneider, a long-haired, 21-year-old Berkeley student. Schneider came up with the book idea a couple of years ago at a BMUG organizational meeting, figuring he wouldn’t have to do all of the work. Wrong. Along with co-editors Hans Hansen and Noah Potkin, Schneider wrote most of the book.
And he’s still in school: “I haven’t dropped out yet, which is supposed to happen with BMUG ...”
If you are new to ResEdit, Zen is a good choice. It’s a little more down-to-earth than ResEdit Complete and much simpler to understand than ResEdit Reference. You’ll be able to make all kinds of system tweaks and hacks and turn your Mac more into your kind of Mac.
But, like the first edition, Zen lacks a lot of the good information contained in ResEdit Complete. For instance, one of the best tricks I’ve found with ResEdit is adjusting the speed of my mouse’s tracking. This cool little hack gives me much greater control over tracking speed than the available shareware system extensions.
However, the information is only available from ResEdit Complete, and all mention of the resource is absent from BMUG’s book.
I took the easy way out and bought both books. If you, however, need to make a choice, examine your user level and your ResEdit needs and experience.
Those facts will make your decision for you.
Reprinted from The Finder, monthly newsletter of the Mid-Columbia Macintosh Users Group. Non-profit computer users groups have permission to reprint this article providing the author and the Mid-Columbia Macintosh Users Group in Tri-Cities, Wash., are fully credited and a copy of the newsletter in which the article appears is sent to:
