A cross-platform answer file?

[Frank Leahy]

On Monday, January 26, 2004, at 09:58  PM, 
use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com wrote:

> My question is:  If Apple expects Tuviah to do this, why can't we 
> expect
> Apple to do it?
>
> I'd much rather see Tuviah and all other Mac developers spend their 
> time
> making cool features that really show off what OS X has to offer 
> rather than
> spending time reinventing forgotten wheels.

To answer the specific question of why extension filtering isn't built 
into the Mac's StandardFile dialog -- that's because it wasn't needed.  
Remember that there were no file extensions on the original Mac, and 
there also weren't any when the Nav Services version was written.

As for the more general eternal question -- why hasn't Apple done A, B 
or C?  I worked at Apple for 7 1/2 years, in the late 80's and early 
90's, and there were always too many things to do and not enough people 
to do them.  When we didn't have time to write things ourselves, or 
when we couldn't figure out which of the dozens of options people might 
want we would leave hooks in place so that they could do it themselves 
-- ergo the Standard File FilterProc.

But the bottomline is this, even if Apple did fix file filtering 
(unlikely) there will be compatibility issues for older systems, and if 
RunRev wants to support those systems they will have to write a filter 
proc anyway.  So they might as well just bite the bullet and fix the 
bug.

I guess if this feature is that important we should all be voting for 
it, right?  (How does one do that?)

Best,
-- Frank Leahy