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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Whoawhoawhoa, slow down, buddy...... right-click? You're scaring me with your crazy-talk!
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