22. Bundles and Packages

Many of Xcode’s products take the form of packages, directory trees that the Finder presents as single files. Let’s pause now to consider the problem of resources. Resources are the sorts of data that are integral to an application, but for one reason or another aren’t suitable to incorporate into source code: strings, lookup tables, images, human-interface layouts, sounds, and the like.

In the original Mac OS, applications kept resources in resource forks, mini-databases kept in parallel with the data stream one normally thinks of as a file. The problem with the Resource Manager was that it did not scale well to sets of many, large, or changeable resources. The catalog written into each resource file was fragile, and ...

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