File associations in OS 9

[Stephen Barncard]

Actually there was always a procedure...'Rebuild the Desktop' that 
fixed file associations. There is a four finger salutation of some 
kind done when a volume was mounted that got the "Rebuild the 
Desktop?" dialog. Also the original TechTool would delete the desktop 
file (forcing a rebuild) and do a 'zap' the Pram....

and yes, Micromat still offers it.. it was always regular maintenance 
just like 'fixing permissions' is today with OSX...

http://www.micromat.com/tt_lite/tt_lite.html

I love a lot of things about OS9... it's speedy, lack of eye-candy 
(have you seen it run on a dual-1.25ghz machine?).

The text editing core code was better engineered as far as selection 
is concerned.

  It's totally different in OSX. The timing is way different. It's 
hard in OSX to say, click before a selection, as it wants to keep the 
selection active, eventually by clicking you lose the content 
completely. One does about 3x as much clicking. And files launch way 
too easily from a list when one is trying to just edit the filename. 
And don't get me started about the default listing of files in the 
ask/answer file dialogs - one has to click three times every time to 
get a descending file list (it doesn't stick). And I preferred 
borders around windows. In OSX I swear I click inside the boundaries 
of a window and I get what's behind the window selected instead. This 
happens 3 or 4 times a day. The NEXT geeks won in that department. If 
we hadn't so loudly complained, we wouldn't have a desktop.  Having 
said that, even with all the eye candy, it's amazingly stable.



>Association of a "primary" application with a creator signature in 
>Mac OS is...erm...mysterious. In my experience, the best method for 
>dealing with this sort of situation is:
>1. Move the application you want to be primary out of its folder and 
>onto the desktop.