Hey all,
Just wondering if anybody knows what type of program development application was around for classic macs back in the day and if such a program exists here at macintosh garden. I've had a quick scan through about a third of the apps then gave up.
I intend to open up a few old programs just to see what makes them tick and mess around with them purely for my own selfish needs. No intention to modify programs and then redistribute them.
I3loodTeeth
I am no developer of mac software but Codewarrior was very popular back when the faithful were pining for the return of Steve Jobs. There is also the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop somewhere on the site, as well Macintosh Common Lisp, Macintosh BASIC, Think C, AppleScript Guides, McAssembly, Turbo Pascal, Think Pascal and probably others too. It's been a while since I've looked.
soudesune,
thanks for the suggestions, I'll check them out. I also need a program that can tell me what language applications were created with so I don't have to sift through assembly code.
I3loodTeeth
There are a lot of compilers. Very few (I know of no) decompilers. There are some great disassemblers. MacNosy is the best disassembler I've ever seen on any platform. To look at loaded code on 68k macs, I'd suggest TMON. The only way I know to tell what language a program was written in is to sift through its assembly code. MacNosy can sometimes recognize a compiler by the library routines it uses.
Does anyone know where I can find a download of MacNosy?
No download AFAIK, but it is for sale from the author. See http://www.jasik.com/purchasing.html
That webpage was last updated in 2003, so I don't know if it is still for sale at the (then) asking price of USD 225. That price is a bit ridiculous these days for something with negligible demand.
In case anyone is wondering, MacNosy is indeed still for sale. He charged me $100, and I actually think it's worth it. It's a fantastic disassembler. It splits the code into blocks and annotates everything, especially when it recognizes the boilerplate of a system call.
+1
RealBasic is very good for beginners. If you have any experience coding with Microsoft Visual Basic on Windows, you'll feel right at home 
I highly recommend CodeWarrior, in particular CodeWarrior Pro v6 http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/codewarrior-6
It has C, C++ and Pascal compilers along with 68K and PPC assemblers. Output to PPC, 68K, FAT and CarbonLib (OS X) executables. In addition, you can create Windows EXE files as well.
Included are several tutorials and example projects that are excellent.
Gary
Personally I have always found Think / Symantec Pascal to be THE best programming environment ever. There was also a Think C, but I've never tried that.
It's a pity that when Symantec purchased it, they just threw it aside. 
If you want to be nosy about an applications resources (icons, pictures windows, sounds, etc.) and modify those, then you need ResEdit or Resourcer. They can also look at the code, but it's not a decompiler, so isn't easy to understand for anyone not an expert.
The best environment I ever used was HyperCard However, back in the day I used Borland's Turbo Pascal, and then moved on to Metrowerks' CodeWarrior for anything requiring compiled code.
That wasn't much however, and I ended up moving to MacPerl and MacPython for a lot of my stuff (using TK and WxWidgets for GUI work).
Unless you're proficient at creating your own ResEdit templates, Resourcerer 2.0 is worth having in your toolkit; it's got a built-in disassembler and way more templates than ResEdit. Resourcerer was my main analysis and hacking platform from 1991 to 1999. I used this in combination with PatchMaker (which had a great binary diff feature and the ability to do variable length code patches) to make updates to already-compiled software when the source code was no longer available.
