To address your questions, you have many options for data inclusion. You can pull in resources from other named files (perhaps edited in ResEdit or Resorcerer), or you can represent icon or picture resource definitions in your Rez source as hexadecimal strings, as you prefer. I'm not sure what format your "icon" file is, but you can also pull individual resource data from arbitrary files. See manual. ... View more

It would not surprise me if VC++6 was not supported by latest SDK - You may be on your own. It can certainly be done with older SDKs though. ... View more

Do you hear those black helicopters hovering over your house? ... View more

Building and Managing Programs in MPW (2nd edition) ... View more

> I can't get my hands on ResEdit/Resorcerer or a decent rez language documentation The relevant documentation is Building and Managing Programs in MPW. ... View more

> Is there any way to make a plugin that works on both CS2 and CS3? Trivial. Check my Makefiles, or the Xcode instructions in the SDK. No source changes are required (if you write ordinary portable code). ... View more

Try GraphicsMagick. ... View more

If you're hand-rolling your own PNG code, then you're on your own. My advice is to use libpng. ... View more

Use libpng. For code relevant to alpha, see my psdparse or icoformat. It sounds like you're not correctly setting color_type. ... View more

Use libtiff. I wrote a plugin which uses that library. It has a minor remaining bug - build related, not code - but otherwise is fairly complete. ... View more

As replied by email, one "step by step" might be to examine the complete source code to Carbon plugins on my site. Actually, all of those plugins are Win32/Carbon/Classic portable. ... View more

Oh, I see. Yes you're probably right, but wouldn't you need to use Win32 API to do it? ... View more

It sounds like you want something like a preview? There is code to do this here (you can download the plugin to see it working). ... View more

Gotcha - I missed that bit :) ... View more

I wrote a program (<a href="http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/#psdparse">psdparse</a>) which extracts all this layer information from a PSD on disk, to XML if you wish (Photoshop is not required). Sample output:<br /><br /><pre><br />$ ./psdparse ../testpsd/slashtest.psd --xmlout<br /><?xml version="1.0"?><br /><PSD FILE='../testpsd/slashtest.psd' VERSION='1' CHANNELS='3' ROWS='72' COLUMNS='72' DEPTH='8' MODE='3' MODENAME='RGBColor'><br /> <LAYER NAME='Background' TOP='0' LEFT='0' BOTTOM='72' RIGHT='72' WIDTH='72' HEIGHT='72'><br /> <BLENDMODE OPACITY='100' CLIPPING='0'><br /> <NORMAL /> <!-- not parsed --><br /> <TRANSPARENCYPROTECTED /><br /> </BLENDMODE><br /> </LAYER><br /><br /> <LAYER NAME='abc/def' TOP='26' LEFT='31' BOTTOM='57' RIGHT='68' WIDTH='37' HEIGHT='31'><br /> <BLENDMODE OPACITY='100' CLIPPING='0'><br /> <NORMAL /> <!-- not parsed --><br /> </BLENDMODE><br /> </LAYER><br /><br /> <LAYER NAME='a/b/c/de/fg' TOP='12' LEFT='7' BOTTOM='43' RIGHT='44' WIDTH='37' HEIGHT='31'><br /> <BLENDMODE OPACITY='100' CLIPPING='0'><br /> <NORMAL /> <!-- not parsed --><br /> <TRANSPARENCYPROTECTED /><br /> </BLENDMODE><br /> </LAYER><br /><br /> <COMPOSITE CHANNELS='3' HEIGHT='72' WIDTH='72'><br /> </COMPOSITE><br /></PSD><br /><br /></pre> ... View more

Turns out the problem was not the plugin, but a weird mix of UAC/Administrator/Remote Desktop... here's what the user wrote:<br /><br />> I did my testing via remote desktop, as I was no longer near the PC in question.I started by closing down photoshop, and bypassing some of the the UAC (user account control), by running the program as administrator. Since that's what messes a whole lot of other programs up, I thought 'well, you never know'. So I proceeded to make a new image, scribbled a bit on it, and attempted to save it. It actually worked. I thought this was a bit odd, and descided to reboot photoshop in normal user mode again. This time, somehow, I _could_ save as ICO again. I'm really confused about all this. Either photoshop was somehow confused by the freshly installed plugin last time, or running it as Administrator once fixed something, I really don't know. I'm in application development myself, and I really have no sensible way of explaining this behaviour. All in all, it works now. And not only via remote desktop. <br /><br />> - install plugin in the proper directory<br /><br />> - boot cs3 normally<br /><br />> - saving as ico gives 'D:\Path\thingy.ico" because the plugin entry point count not be found..' repeatably. <br /><br />> - <crying like a baby><br /><br />> - [From remote desktop]<br /><br />> - Starting photoshop as admin, which made saving work.<br /><br />> - Restarting photoshop as normal user, and saving still works<br /><br />> - [No longer on remote desktop<br /><br />> - Starting photoshop normally, and saving still works. ... View more

Yes, that looks kosher. Re-reading your original message, hmm, I see it was unlikely to be the PiPL anyway. I don't use VS to build my Win32 plugins, so I can't be sure, but I know that CodeWarrior used separate DLL versions of some libraries. Are you setting everything up correctly in VS for a DLL build product? ... View more

Have you checked your PiPL for correctness? ... View more

What development system are you using? Can you show your source/Makefile? Did you start by compiling one of the sample plugins? ... View more

The CS2 SDK does have a document about "Mach-O conversion" - basically meant to help people moving from Codewarrior to Xcode (neither of which are mandatory for building plugins anyway). Whatever you need to know about executable formats can be inferred from source code and Makefiles (and an Xcode project or two) on my site. Contact me for more information. ... View more

As far as I am aware Adobe does not extend this functionality to 3rd party plugins. ... View more

This can also happen when developing on the Mac, for instance if ZeroLink is enabled in Xcode. ... View more

You want the SDK and documentation too? You must be new here... The Public Beta SDK did not include the PDFs. Ask for the CS2 SDK. ... View more

Even just linking to it here is toxic enough to get a post deleted, I have observed... i /me refrains from editorialising further ... View more

> After Photoshop CS, Adobe uses the zip format for data saving as default. CS2 has only ever made PackBits PSDs for me, no matter what bit depth. Can you elucidate? ... View more

Does anyone know how to create a ZIP compressed PSD/PSB in Photoshop? ... View more

Avoid the whole shemozzle and buy a Mac. As a bonus, your whole system, not just Photoshop, will be fast and totally reliable. :) Btw, this is the wrong forum for your question (this one is for discussion of the developer SDK). ... View more

I could help you if you were using C (much source code for format plugins in C is on my site). ... View more

> As for ZIP compression in version 3.0 of Photoshop There is no such thing. Any inference otherwise from the 6.0 Release 2 documentation is incorrect. If you can find a PSD with ZIP - if such a thing can be created at all - I'm more than happy to try to open it with 3.0 to prove this. Once again, I suspect that ZIP is only relevant to PSB - although of course they omitted to explain. Re: PackBits - Apple invented that particular RLE flavour. It was in the Mac Toolbox ROM circa 1984 and may have been used by the Lisa too. It's one of the TIFF standard compressors. ... View more