Problems with snow leopard

[Richard Gaskin]

stephen barncard wrote:

> As a long time mac user from the beginning, I've always thought the type and
> creator codes were VERY useful to eliminate the ambiguity of what to launch
> and I put down the PC method of using suffixes as being brain dead.

Apparently the Mac team did too, as we learned loudly when the NeXT team 
followed Steve back to Apple and tried to get rid of creator codes in 
their new OS X under the argument that they were unnecessary.

This internal turf war was mirrored by developers on Apple's UI 
developer mailing list.

For all the many years Apple has been hosting discussion lists for 
developers, to the best of my knowledge the UI list was shut down only 
once, and that was over this issue.

The outcry from people like you about the merit of creator codes was 
sweeping and furious, yet the NeXTites felt secure knowing that since 
they had been loyal with Steve all this time their opinion would 
ultimately prevail.

Among developers on the UI list this issue caused a flame war so great 
the list was taken offline for quite a while, and it was many months 
(more than a year IIRC) before it was resurrected.

Now, all these many years later, Apple is at last losing this 
once-valuable bit of metadata.

If there is comfort in this otherwise sad passing, it's for us 
multi-platform developers:

With every step Apple takes to eliminate differences between OSes, the 
less forked code we need to write.  As they decrease their unique value, 
they increase ours. :)

If only the world's OS vendors would come to common agreement on the 
placement of dialog buttons....

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  Revolution training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com