File Types and Creator Codes

[Ian Wood]

On 26 Sep 2009, at 00:43, Sarah Reichelt wrote:

> My reading of the Roughly Drafted article, is that the UTIs will have
> all the abilities of creator codes on a per file as well as file
> extension basis.

No it doesn't, which is why all the fuss is kicking up. You need to  
read the comments as well, because the author left out information in  
the main article.

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/09/22/inside-snow-leopards-uti-apple-fixes-the-creator-code/#comment-21182


"So no, UTI isn’t a drop in replacement for Creators that does exactly  
the same thing, because doing exactly the same thing is not the  
desired behavior (from Apple’s perspective). UTI offers a broad  
solution to a variety of problems, and allows a form of Type/Creator  
functionality (although certainly not identical).
The bottom line appears to be, if you want documents bound to a  
specific app, you either do it by file type (assigning a default app  
for “all apps of this type”) or by creating a new file type (a  
specific UTI “exported” by your app), or you can fall back to adding a  
resource fork to tell the Finder which app you prefer to open it with  
(via the Finder’s “open with”)."


UTIs don't work on a per-file level, just per-extension. If you want a  
specific file to open up in a specific app *without adding a new file  
extension* then you need to use the Get Info window or reverse- 
engineer the resource fork that the Get Info window adds to that file.

So to 'fix' the limitations of the current UTI scheme, we're using  
another supposedly deprecated route (resource forks) to hold the info?!?

> Since this (like creator codes) depends on software developers setting
> up the right links, we need the RunRev standalone builder to start
> giving us the option to define a UTI for our apps, as well as, or
> instead of a creator code & file type.


On 26 Sep 2009, at 05:07, J. Landman Gay wrote:

> I looked at the plist that the SB generates. There are identifiers  
> at the bottom, and I think we could just add our own to these:

The problem is that final string:
<string>rev</string>

File extensions are what UTIs run off. :-(

Ian