2/14/2023 0 Comments Textwrangler for windows downloadSo, to sum up, a document can have at least three different aspects that associate it with an application: In addition, you, the user, can customize a preferred application binding: the Finder’s Get Info dialog lets you bind a particular file or extension to a specific application. Mac OS X’s Launch Services facility maintains a database of such claims, which it uses to determine the binding that operates when you double-click a document in the Finder. An application bundle contains an important file called ist that lets it “claim” ownership of certain file types. In the Unix way, a document’s file extension just says what type it is ownership of that type is another matter. File extensions are still with us, though.) For example, a text file would typically be a “ain-text”, which is a subclass of “public.text”. ![]() It’s invisible metadata, like a type code, but it’s longer, it carries more information, and it can be part of a hierarchy. (In early 2005 Apple introduced another way of specifying a file’s type: the uniform type identifier, or UTI. Still, they do have one great advantage: they are “just text,” so they can be seen and changed. Adam provided a brief but trenchant critique many years ago (see “ Mac OS X 10.1: The Main Features,” ). Many users regard Mac OS X’s implementation of file extensions as somewhat lame – they’re ugly and incomprehensible now you see them, now you don’t you can change them, but your hand gets slapped. The Unix approach (or what I’m calling “Unix” for purposes of this article its history actually goes back to DEC and DOS and is in fact merely optional in Unix) is to use file extensions, which are abbreviations following a period in a document’s name. ![]() For a deep and fascinating historical discussion of this mechanism, see TidBITS publisher Adam Engst’s interview with its inventor, Bruce Horn (“ The Mac at 20: An Interview with Bruce Horn,” ). For example, looking on the Desktop of my Mac OS 9 machine, I see two ordinary plain text files (type code “TEXT”) one belongs to SimpleText (creator code “ttxt”), the other to BBEdit (creator code “R*ch”).Ĭreator and type codes are invisible to the user that’s good because they’re out of your way, but power users require a third-party utility to manage them. One advantage of this approach is that it lets applications share documents of a common type (itself expressed as another four-letter value, the type code). The venerable Mac way of binding a document to an application is the creator code, a four-letter (actually integer) value, unique to an application, attached as metadata to a document. Now, in Snow Leopard, users and developers are complaining that the Unix way is being allowed to run roughshod over the Mac way. Since the very first day of the very first version of Mac OS X, there has been an uneasy detente between the Unix way of binding documents to applications and the former Mac way, inherited from the early days of the Mac OS. When you double-click a document in the Finder, how does the system decide what application should open it? The relationship between a document and its owning application is called a preferred application binding.
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