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Infinite Mac: Resource Fork Roundtripping
# One of the frequent emails that I get about Infinite Mac is “I’ve been copying over these files to every mac I’ve owned for the past 20 (or 30 or 40) years, how can I load them into your site?” While there’s been a “The Outside World” drive from the very beginning, all it can do is a best-effort import/export using available browser APIs. Classic Mac OS used resource forks for structured data and stored additional metadata in the file system (where it belongs).
After some investigation, I remembered that .zip archives created by modern macOS preserve resource forks(or even ancient Mac OS X - this feature dates back to 10.3). More recently, I also switched the .zip files that Infinite Mac generates when exporting to also use this convention, allowing the Finder to expand and reconstruct the full contents. This video shows these features working together - an old app of mine starts out on the modern macOS host - it can be imported, its vers resource edited, and then exported back out (miraculous today’s Finder still displays information based on it).
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