In yesterday’s Mac OS X Diary, Mark Munz of unmarked software made some statements that have been, to say the least, controversial.
He said: “In Apple’s effort to support UFS, it has unfortunately forsaken all the benefits of HFS. Rather than adding some smarts to the file system (which Mac OS 9 was capable of) such that extended attributes (like Creator/Type) can exist on a UFS volume, Apple has decided it’s OK for users to be thrown back into the 80’s era where filename extensions determined what the file type of a document was. This is incredible unfriendly to the user because there can only be ONE handler of a type when there is no Creator/Type combo, meaning a file saved in Photoshop may be opened by another application when double-clicked. Be careful how you name your files, and remember what the extension is supposed to be or you may have difficultly opening that doc again.”
However, Leif Smith of Pattern Research in Denver, CO, said that files have extensions and that he can open a file with a given extension in many applications.
“There is a panel that allows me to specify the favored app to open a file with a given extension,” Smith told MacCentral. “I can change that preference at any time, and can override it on a case by case basis without difficulty. I think there must be more to Apple’s strategy than limiting users to one app only for each extension. It may be my inexperience with Macs but I find Mac OS 9 is much more picky about who can open what than is NeXT, and I suspect that if Mac OS X is not yet as good as NeXT in that regard, it will get there soon.”
Meanwhile, AppleScript guru Bill Briggs said that the thought that “Creator is a single user-centric methodology” seems wrong to him.
“There’s nothing about Creator and Type assignments that is single-user centric,” he said. “It’s a MUCH better system than file extension mapping. Highly advantageous.”