Apple Bug Screener Unaware of Aliases

The 10.4 version of Preview adds a nice PDF bookmarking feature, but it’s incredibly fragile because it only tracks bookmarked files by exact path name — move or rename a PDF and your bookmarks to the file are lost. This could easily be fixed by tracking files through the Alias Manager, but Drunkenbatman reports on a bug filed against Preview which was closed by a bug screener at Apple who doesn’t seem to realize this is even possible.

Update: A reader asks whether this might not simply be the case of a bug screener who’s unaware of aliases, and that the correct response would be for the original reporter of the bug to reply to point out that using aliases would solve the problem nicely. (The original report, as quoted on Drunkenblog, doesn’t even mention “aliases”; it does mention “file system nodes”, but that’s pointless, since there aren’t any APIs in Carbon or Cocoa for dealing with files as inodes.)

★ Sunday, 2 October 2005