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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."
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
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.
Time to put them to rest for good? Why? What on earth for? I am puzzled by your joy.
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.
You can flag a document to open with any application, regardless of the default. You can also change the default for any document type, including newly-created ones. Finally, you can right click and choose the app you want to open your doc with right there.
I think the complaint is that apps in 10.6 are not flagging their own documents to open with themselves. It should be easy to patch this in for any app that is currently being supported, but I suspect most won't care, because it's just not a huge deal.
The trouble, and what seems to be irking the faithful, is that treating documents simply by type leaves no way to treat some documents of a given type in one way, and others of the same type in a different way.
.jpgs and a different one for viewing them you are now screwed. You can either set .jpgs to open in one, or the other; but you can no longer have ones created in photoshop open in photoshop while ones from outside are just opened in a lightweight viewer(or whatever the use case happens to be).
If, for instance, you prefer one graphics program for editing
Sort of a niche thing; but sounds like the people who relied on that class of configurations are out of luck.
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.
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