On Jul 8, 2007, at 3:25 AM, Steve Checkoway wrote: On Jul 7, 2007, at 4:19 PM, Bill Cheeseman wrote:
on 2007-07-07 6:07 PM, Stéphane Sudre at email@hidden wrote:
I'm sure it's not news to you but:
A long time ago in a far far away API,
That's a far more eloquent answer than the one that I wrote twice, and
deleted-without-sending twice: There are some API's, including Cocoa API's,
that take a creator type as a parameter, and make it a little bit easier to
do some useful things that you can also do with other information.
(And this is more or less the one I had in response to that but deleted without sending before.)
Given who you're talking to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Espinosa>, I suspect he knows that quite well.
Given that it's Bill Cheeseman who's talking, he knows that quite well :-)
I've known Bill since System 7.5 days, when 32-bit OSTypes were the coin of the realm. But in these days when a single Finder icon consumes the equivalent of the entire memory capacity of a Mac Plus, having a flat, cryptic, mnemonic 4-character namespace for all applications from all vendors has long ceased to make sense except for backwards compatibility with legacy datafiles and Classic applications.
If there are APIs that are easier to use with a const OSType creatorCode that don't have a similarly easy const CFStringRef bundleIdentifier equivalent, then file a bug. Especially since bundleIDs don't need byte flipping, using a bundleID should be the easiest way to get anything done with Launch Services or related API.
If Activity Monitor once had an assigned creator code and has lost it, and that has had a demonstrable effect on the user experience, that would be worth filing a bug as well, though I suspect that 10.2.8 is long enough in the past and 10.5 too imminent for it to make much difference now.
Unless it can be demonstrated, though, that Xcode was the cause of Activity Monitor dropping its creator code, this thread has wandered far from relevance for this list (even as marked [OT]). Please let's not use this thread to rehash decades-old design decisions of Mac OS X regarding types, creators, and extensions.
Chris Chris |