Re: [OT] Activity Monitor has no creator?
Re: [OT] Activity Monitor has no creator?
- Subject: Re: [OT] Activity Monitor has no creator?
- From: Laurence Harris <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2007 21:21:57 -0400
On Jul 8, 2007, at 12:30 PM, Chris Espinosa wrote:
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.
To my way of thinking there's no other good mechanism for assigning
an application to open a specific file. The Open With feature in a
Finder Get Info window is too heavy-handed IMO. It adds a resource
fork if the file doesn't already have one, a 'usro' resource of about
1K, and a custom icon. It can turn a 100-byte file that occupies 4K
on disk into a dual-fork file that uses 56K or more on disk. Changing
its creator doesn't modify the file itself in any way. I don't want
to get into a discussion about how cheap disk space is these days,
but there are people who run out of it, and both file copies and
displaying icons take performance hits when you add a custom icon to
a file.
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.
That wasn't my intention. I just picked this list since I think of it
as relevant to discussions about Xcode and other tools, and I don't
think there's a better list to ask about this anyway.
So are you saying that creator signatures are no longer recommended
for applications that don't have documents? Actually, since a lot of
Cocoa applications don't set types or creator signatures on their
documents, would that suggest that even those applications have no
reason to have unique, registered creator signatures? Or are they
still recognized within Apple as being useful in case a user sets a
file's creator to that application?
Larry _______________________________________________
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