Snow Leopard Snubs Document Creator Codes

Speaking of TidBITs, Matt Neuburg had a great piece earlier this month on one of the few changes in Snow Leopard that I consider a turn for the worse: Snow Leopard now disregards creator codes when determining which app should open a particular file by default.

To be clear, the reason this change is problematic is not because the specific technology of type and creator codes has been abandoned, but rather that the functionality they provided is no longer available. If Apple wants to use UTIs or some other new metadata stash in place of 4-byte type and creator codes, that’s fine. The problem is they’ve abandoned them in Snow Leopard and replaced them with a system that doesn’t allow users to have, say, some text files open by default in BBEdit and others open in TextEdit, or some JPEGs to open by default in Preview and others in Acorn. The new system only “works” if you want all files of any particular type to open by default in the same app.

★ Monday, 21 September 2009