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Snow Leopard Snubs Document Creator Codes

Posted by timothy on from the mind-the-new-mantrap-in-the-living-room dept.

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."

7 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. Re:We Know Best by nine-times · · Score: 4, Insightful

    On the other hand, you could argue that Apple is protecting users from developers who say, "We know what's best for you. We're making it just work. Now just sit back and drink your kool aid."

    If I want my text documents to open in BBEdit, I'll set them to open in BBEdit thankyouverymuch. I set my default for them to open in something else, and that's the way I want it.

  2. Problem? by clone53421 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
    1. Re:Problem? by nine-times · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The extra information was a stupid extra step. "Word document" is all the OS needs in order to figure out how to open it.

      Well actually OSX still lets you set the proper application to open on a per-document basis, and it's kind of handy. AFAIK, what happens if you put a Word document on a computer that doesn't have word, but has OO.o, OSX will read the part that says, "open me in Word" and say, "Well I don't have Word but I have OO.o, so I'll open you in that instead." So there's no problem.

      However, let's say you have both OpenOffice and Word installed on the same machine, and 9 times out of 10 you want to open your Word documents in OpenOffice, but you have that 1 document out of 10 that doesn't display properly in OpenOffice and you want to preserve the current layout. What's actually kind of nice IMO is that you can say, "I want my default to be to open all Word documents in OpenOffice, but I can set this one individual file to open in Word." And then the OS will open each document in the correct viewer when you double-click on it, automatically. It works great.

      So what's being talked about here is that it has typically been set in the past so that, regardless of your default application, documents were set to open in whatever application you saved/created them in. So it's like lets say OpenOffice is my default application but I create a new document in Word. The old behavior is that document would automatically be set to open in Word when you double-click on it instead of OpenOffice, even though OpenOffice is your default application. It makes a certain amount of sense to do it that way, since you may have done layout work in Word that won't render properly in OpenOffice.

      However, I personally want to set a default application for each file-type, and then only have them use a different application if I manually set them to do so.

    2. Re:Problem? by Mneme · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, they were opening in QuickTime just because they were originally saved by QuickTime.

      No one ever did Get Info.

      It sounds like this previous behavior seems odd to you (since you misunderstood what happened), which supports the perspective that for most users, the behavior was odd and the change amounts to a bug fix.

  3. Re:We Know Best by nine-times · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Just to explain this, for me where I really think this is an issue is not text as much as graphics. I work with graphics and often enough, the application that created the graphics is Photoshop. However, I never want to actually open the file in Photoshop unless I actually want to edit it. Why open a JPEG in photoshop when it's going to take a full minute to load?

    So I've set Preview to be the default application for viewing graphics, but still, any graphics I make in photoshop are set to open in Photoshop. If Snow Leopard is going to ignore that it was made in Photoshop and open it in Preview instead, as I've set the OS to do, that seems like a "bug fix" to me.

  4. Not the UNIX way by McDutchie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    File name extensions are definitely not the UNIX way. They are the CP/M way, copied later by DOS, then by Windows, then by UNIX graphical environments such as KDE, GNOME, and Mac OS X -- but still not by the under-the-hood UN*X running any of them; to UN*X, it's just an indiscriminate part of the filename.

    It's very, very unfortunate that Mac OS X is now reverting to the primitive CP/M way. It causes a loss of essential functionality that Mac power users have always depended on: to know that a document will always be opened in the application with which you've created it.

    For me, there is less and less reason to use a Mac as Apple keeps progressively emulating Microsoft. This is yet another nail in the coffin.

    1. Re:Not the UNIX way by AndrewNeo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      While you are right that file extensions are not the UNIX way, from TFA and the other comments, it seems OSX uses Uniform Type Identifiers (a variant on MIME types) to identify files, rather than by their extension or creator code. I would assume extensions are still used When All Else Fails (for example, when reading files from FAT32 with no metadata attached)