| Taming Expander by J. D. Stephensen
Note: Stuffit Expander versionn 5.1.3 renders this edit obsolete.
Unfortunately David Sholkoff's SITPatch was removed from distribution; fortunately, I have been able to decipher much of what he accomplished with his patch
- Removing Expander's ability to overwrite Internet Preferences;
- Getting rid of the advertising screen; and
- Adding icons so that the files appear correctly even though they will have Expander as their creator rather than Stuffit Deluxe.
So let's begin ...
Expander's Resources
To begin, open Stuffit Expander in ResEdit. You'll see something like the image below, though the icons you display may be different, and if you use Resourcer, you'll see no icons at all, of course. We will primarily be concerned with the resources encircled below.
Opening the ICdt resource hits upon the gold mine of Internet config information. The fine folks at Aladdin Systems were even kind enough to name the resources for us.
The image has been cut off, because we are primarily concerned with the first two listings above, since they are the only ones which cannot be disabled in the application's preferences. Each of these resources contains the mapping tables for Internet Config which will be written to the user's preferences when Expander is quit. If the resources are deleted, Expander will freeze, so we must edit them instead.
ID 3020
This example is for ID 3020, but the principle holds for the other resources as well.
 Before:
 And after:
And Voilá! The number of zeros does not seem to matter, but there must be some data left, or, again, Expander will freeze at each quit as it tries to write the internet preferences. I have chosen 2 lines of zeroes arbitrarily, and this seems to work for me, so I didn't bother to test with fewer. Stuffit Expander no longer has any data to write for ".SIT" suffixes.
Repeat the procedure for ID 3021 if you like, though it's not as crucial, since that one is for Private Files. All the others can be zeroed or not as desired, but I recommend leaving them as is so that Expander's preferences can be turned on if desired. Note that Expander can still unstuff all the file types. This edit only modifies what the application can do to your Internet Preferences file.
Why just Netscape?
Stuffit Expander is preset to show an advertising screen to those without Stuffit Deluxe installed whenever the application is called. This adds about a 3-second delay when Expander is launched from the Finder and is quite annoying. However, the screen is automatically skipped when Netscape Navigator or Communicator calls on Expander directly. This little gem is stored in the "SUP•" resource. (I'm using the bullet since the diamond isn't a web-safe ASCII character.)
"suppress msg apps"
Opening SUP• resource ID# 128 shows us that only applications of creator "MOSS" are blessed to not have the nag screen:
Wild card to the Rescue!
Change this little ditty to the Mac's favorite wild card string, as below, and we'll no longer be bothered.
Generic Icons be Gone!
Once you have changed the internet preferences so that archives appear with a creator of "SITx" (Stuffit Expander) instead of "SIT!" (Stuffit Deluxe), you'll notice that the files no longer appear properly in the Finder. That's because Stuffit Expander isn't designed to create archives; we needed to fool the OS to work around Internet Explorer's bug, however, so we are purposefully giving these files the "wrong" creator -- in truth, Stuffit archives ARE created by Stuffit deluxe (or Drop Stuff) and should have "SIT!" as the creator. We still want pretty icons, though, don't we?
Looking into Expander's BNDL resource reveals the following (I've added the names for clarity) .
Stuffit Expander contains a BNDL resource for Stuffit Deluxe in case the user doesn't have that application on the hard drive.
Stuffit Deluxe Icons:
The icons already exist in this file, and are assigned in BNDL 129 as you can see below
However, Stuffit Expander is not given any document icons in BNDL ID 128
To change that, type Command-K (create now resource) three times and add icon information as seen here:
The file type/icon relationships would be the same as in ID 129 if you want the files to appear as normal as possible. Of course, you CAN mess around with these, but the idea here is to make life easier, not mess around with your mind!
That's It! Now have fun!
Make sure and write David Sholkoff a note to thank him for his work!
-J. D. Stephensen |
