Re: Resource Fork - is this a good use/the right thing to do?
Re: Resource Fork - is this a good use/the right thing to do?
- Subject: Re: Resource Fork - is this a good use/the right thing to do?
- From: Jens Alfke <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2008 23:07:57 -0700
On 22 Apr '08, at 10:21 PM, Daniel DeCovnick wrote:
Through a lot of thought experiments, I've come to the conclusion
that the best place to save this sort of thing would be in the
resource fork of the file being opened, but I could be totally off
the mark there, and it's certainly an unorthodox thing to do.
It would have been the right thing to do ten years ago. But these days
resource forks are definitely a legacy feature and it would be a bad
idea to write new software that relies on them.
Have you looked at Extended Attributes? They're kind of the moral
equivalent of resources, but they're newer, lighter-weight and better
integrated into the filesystem. I don't know if there's any in-depth
documentation, but you can start by reading the man pages for
getxattr, setxattr, et al.
Option 3. Add my own Metadata key and put an XML or similarly
textual version of my graphical rep as the string. I have no idea
whether or not this is possible. It seems like a bad abuse of the
metadata system in any case.
This seems reasonable. It's the same way that the Finder stores
comments, which is analogous to what you're doing.
Option 4. Wrap the file anyway and put an alias where it used to be.
Seems like a bad idea. Yes, the target user base for this app would
know what was going on, but it just seems wrong to hide people's
stuff like that.
Way too much software doesn't understand/resolve alias files, so this
could cause trouble.
A symlink would be more transparent, but I agree with you that messing
with the location of people's files is a bad idea.
—Jens
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