Snow Leopard Snubs Document Creator Codes

adamengst writes "In this TidBITS article, Matt Neuburg explores how Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard changes how the operating system handles preferred application bindings, dropping support for the creator codes that have been part of the Mac OS from the early days. He also explains how to work around the problem, if you want, for instance, text documents created with BBEdit to open in BBEdit even when TextEdit is the default handler for text files."

Comments

quicktime

[e**(i pi)-1]

This is especially annoying with Quicktime. The new quicktime in Snow Leopard is no match in comparison with the old Quicktime 7 Pro:

The editing features are now limited to trimming for example, the export possibilities rudimentary.

Fortunately, one can still reinstall Quicktime 7 additionally in Snow Leopard, but one can not change the default application binding for Quicktime. This is a serious problem.

For me, Quicktime pro is half the reason to use a Mac. Changes like this from Leopard to Snow leopard always make me nervous and I'm glad to have Linux catching up. Even apple might screw things up in future, possibly due to pressure of the movie and music industry.

One can for example suspect that the lack of cut and paste ability or export of sound only etc is due to such industry pressure. The average user can no more cut out advertisements for example. I do not see any technical reason why the new limitations are in place if quicktime pro is ditched. An other reason for the current limitations could be that a new QT pro is in the making. I hope this is the case. Still, one should be able to change the default application binding to an old version of quicktime!

Re:quicktime

[mdarksbane]

According to the Ars write-up, the features are missing because Quicktime was completely rewritten to be a more modern codebase. Among other things, this was required to be able to get it to run on the iPhone. Unfortunately, this also means that some features are still missing. Apple has told developers that they intend on bring Quicktime X back to the level of Pro soon.

Also, some of the awesome features of Quicktime Pro were so embedded in the system that they caused a real problem for movie viewing. Most media formats stream data in a way that quicktime doesn't like - it wasn't to know when the beginning and end are so it can do all of its fancy frame-by-frame selections. So if you read in a divx avi file with an mp3 soundtrack, it had to load the entire file, generate its editing information, and convert it to a .mov in the background to even play it. Hopefully they can find a way to do the best of both worlds in the new version once it finally gets up to snuff.

Re:We Know Best

[DudeTheMath]

It's the developer, not the end user, that applies the creator code that's being ignored (I can't remember the last time I manually changed a creator code--it was long before OS X, anyway). The end user can always do a "Get Info" to change the default app for any individual document.

That said, I agree that it's a pain to have to do that for every specific document you want opened with a particular app; I just saw a nit that needed picking.

File Association Hijacking

[ThrowAwaySociety]

He also explains how to work around the problem

It's not a problem, it's a fix. This is the way it should work.

Suppose I put a Word document on a computer where OO.o is installed instead of Office. The document says "open me in MS Word". The OS says, "Word isn't installed". What happens? What originally should have happened: The OS looks at the document, says "Word document, open this with OO.o", and everything works great. The extra information was a stupid extra step. "Word document" is all the OS needs in order to figure out how to open it.

That's always the way it worked. If you had a Word file (Type=W8BN, Creator=MSWD) on a system without Word (MSWD) installed, the system would identify any other applications capable of opening W8BN files, and open it using that app.

The extra information only came into play when there was more than one application capable of opening W8BN files. It prevented the common Windows practice of "hijacking" another application's file extensions.

Re:Problem?

[Just Some Guy]

So let me get this straight.

Fail. The GP was saying that he'd set all AVI files to open in VLC. In spite of that, some would open in QuickTime anyway because that's what the creator code indicated, which confused the GP greatly because he didn't know that such a mechanism existed.

Re:Creator codes have been deprecated since 10.4

[ThePhilips]

Oh... I digress. The RTFA explicitly says that Finder's "Get Info" window still allows to change application to be used to open the file. IOW, I'm on safe side as it is how I usually do it anyway.

P.S.

Evidence provided through an anonymous tip suggests that removal of the influence of creator codes in Snow Leopard was deliberately imposed by management on engineering. Since engineering's hands are tied, bug reports to them are likely to be met with the usual "works as intended" brush-off.

If Apple did it right, then I'm pretty sure one can programmatically change the per-file association. Or probably even with the AppleScript.

After RTFA it seems to me the issue was greatly exaggerated.