Mac Programming/Image Manipulation Question

Hopefully this is the correct forum for this question but I'm sure I'll find out if its not...

I'm working on a project that requires me to force a specific color table onto a large group of images and turn them into PICT files. The color table has to be exact (same colors in the same order) on each image as well. I also need the images to be resized/cropped, a solid border and some text added.

I'm currently Applescripting Photoshop to perform all of this and triggering actions for the tasks not directly supported by PS scripting. This has proven to be a very fragile way to get the job done and I really would like a stand-alone program.

My question is this: Is there a way to do these things without using Photoshop in OS9? If I were on OSX I would have ImageMagick available but since I'm stuck with OS9 I have to resort to using either Basic, Java or some variation of C. I can write the program on an OSX machine using XCode but I really don't know what route would be the easiest for me. (And I stink at programming)

I would appreciate any help or comments!
Thanks!

I've never done anything programming wise with OS9 however what I think you're looking for is the Carbon framework:

http://developer.apple.com/carbon/

As I understand this you can write classic applications in it or maybe port classic apps to run on OSX I'm not 100%.

That said I've never used it (Cocoa is just plain better and Apple has dropped support for the Classic environment) so I can't really direct you more than that. You might want to try asking on Macrumors, the guys there are very knowledgeable about this stuff .

http://forums.macrumors.com

Take care,

Mark.