J. Landman Gay wrote:
Richard Gaskin wrote:
stephen barncard wrote:
In the early 90s I registered a creator code "BARN" and a document code
"rtfd"
I know the document codes are not registered anymore (and Apple uses
*rtfd*now). But my question is : Do I own my creator code forever?
As forever as your memory allows: creator codes were hotly contested
within Apple when the NeXT team took over, marked for deprecation a few
years later, and no longer supported as of Snow Leopard.
They're sort of supported. If there is no other way to determine the
owner of the file, the creator code will be used if there is one. It's
the last choice though.
True, worth noting for files that have no extension.
But a drag for a few end-users. Here's my favorite example:
Fireworks uses PNG files as their native format, storing the vector info
in an unused portion of the file while keeping a rasterized copy in the
normal image data portion of the file.
In the olden days (read "before Snow Leopard") my Fireworks-created PNGs
would open Fireworks when double-clicked, but PNGs created by other
programs would launch those other programs. This let me have my FW PNGs
work seamlessly with FW, while leaving everything else set to work
seamlessly with the apps that created them.
But under Snow Leopard, the seams are showing: by default all PNGs open
with Preview, and in Get Info I was able to change that so that all PNGs
open with FW. An improvement, but ideally I'd prefer to have only files
made with FW launch FW and leave others alone. I can do that
file-by-file, but that's not much of an improvement. :(
Four bytes is such a small amount of metadata that I'm not sure what the
problem was in maintaining creator codes, beyond the ego value of the
NeXT team being able to push the older Mac team around (oh what a
controversy this was on the Apple HI Dev list; they pulled the list
offline for more than a year as the only way to stop the bickering).
I suspect we're due for another sweeping OS revision, on the order of
the Classic->OS X transition or the move from PPC->Intel, but this time
involving file systems. ("Backward compatibility? What's that?"- Apple).
I wouldn't mind so much if the move were to adopt the Linux file system
(rumors that it would be the Sun file system died about a year before
that platform did), removing one more arbitrary distinction between Mac
and other platforms. But I guess we'll see what the removal of creator
codes is for somewhere down the road....
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
Rev training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com
revJournal blog: http://revjournal.com/blog.irv
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