FIX THIS, Apple!!!
My friend from across the hall asked me to help her open a file for her in MacOS X. The filename had "?image" appended to it. I tried double clicking and it said something like you don't have the app to open it with. I tried to make it open in diskcopy considering it was an image. That didn't work. So I told her I guess it was made with a proprietary disk image program that she didn't have, and we both gave up. After half an hour, it suddenly dawned on me what if I renamed the file with .dmg? And surely when I tried it worked. That completely shocked her out of her mind. "You just freakin' RENAME the file and it just works? do I rename all my files with .dmg so they all work???? I hate computers!! I don't understand them!!" Okay, so in my opinion this should not be happening. Please Apple, I'm sure you can fix this. *idealistically* I think it would be great if there was an industry standard such as every file must have ## bytes of metadata stuck in the beginning of it, kind of like mp3 tags (God Bless mp3 tags!!) and this nightmare would just go away.
Comments
Kill metadata and you end up with wonky situations like this.
Ideally, Apple would be working on a new filesystem or a better implementation of HFS+'s Type/Creator code system in Mac OS X (especially in the Cocoa frameworks). That would fix a lot of problems like this.
Oh well. <img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" />
<strong>My friend from across the hall asked me to help her open a file for her in MacOS X. The filename had "?image" appended to it. I tried double clicking and it said something like you don't have the app to open it with. I tried to make it open in diskcopy considering it was an image. That didn't work. So I told her I guess it was made with a proprietary disk image program that she didn't have, and we both gave up. After half an hour, it suddenly dawned on me what if I renamed the file with .dmg? And surely when I tried it worked. That completely shocked her out of her mind. "You just freakin' RENAME the file and it just works? do I rename all my files with .dmg so they all work???? I hate computers!! I don't understand them!!" Okay, so in my opinion this should not be happening. Please Apple, I'm sure you can fix this. *idealistically* I think it would be great if there was an industry standard such as every file must have ## bytes of metadata stuck in the beginning of it, kind of like mp3 tags (God Bless mp3 tags!!) and this nightmare would just go away.</strong><hr></blockquote>
it's not really apple's fault that toast images don't mount easily with their software.
When you changed it to .dmg, the computer understood and opened the file.
Not that mystifying, really.
-robo
<strong>You can just explain to her that the last three letters after the dot are a code that the computer uses so it knows what kind of file you are telling it to open. It didn't recognize .image, so it said it couldn't open it.
When you changed it to .dmg, the computer understood and opened the file.
Not that mystifying, really.
-robo</strong><hr></blockquote>
Maybe not mystifying, but definitely bullshit. I'm a firm supporter of metadata, and would appreciate it if Apple made OS X more metadata reliant, while still keeping the dot-three extension format.
[quote]
New File Typing Mechanism and Preferences
Project Builder now has its own file typing system. Â*It defines a hierarchy of types instead of a flat list (so that "TIFF" can inherit from "image" and "html" can inherit from "text", etc...) Â*It can recognize the type of a file from its extension, from its OSType (actually, not yet), or from arbitrary "recognizers" that can examine the path more closely or even look inside the file. Â*The new mechanism can also distinguish binary files from text if attempts at more specifically recognizing a file fail.
Over time this mechanism will be used more and more throughout Project Builder. Â*Currently it is mainly used for mapping files to appropriate editors. Â*Just this use has helped us to solve a number of thorny problems in previous releases: binary files will no longer ever open in a text editor unless specifically requested by the user, binary files will never be searched during batch text or regex finds, when there are multiple internal editors that could edit a file it is now possible to set which to use by default and to open a given file in one of the non-default ones as a one-time operation.
There's a new Preferences pane called File Types which allows setting which available internal editor is used for each known file type. Â*The pane contains an outline of the known file types and each row has a popup to select which editor to use.
The Files tab and the Bookmarks tab now have "Open As..." context menu submenus that allow choosing a specific editor to open a given file with as a one-time operation.
Using this new mechanism we now are able to distinguish HTML documentation from other HTML much more robustly and you may notice this as changes in what HTML files show up as plain text vs. rendered. Â*Of course, you now also have independent control through the preferences panel for which editor type will be used for documentation and other HTML.
<hr></blockquote>
My point was that this may be a testbed for a new typing system, that will later be extended system-wide.
--PB
I've made my own Java application that creates documents and sets their type/creator information. It works just fine, without having to use Unix/Windows-style file name extensions. The app supports extensions as well, but they aren't required when the app runs on a Mac.
At any rate, it seems to me, if an app creates a document and that document doesn't launch until you change or add a file extension, that either the app itself is at fault, or the file has undergone some process that strips its file type and file creator info.
(Of course, there's a bug in the current version of Java on OS X that screws up launching an app with a document if the app isn't already open... but that's another story!)
<strong>Just give up on X and use 9. Otherwise install Linux.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yeah, cause linux can handle all these problems with aplomb, right?
<strong>Just give up on X and use 9. Otherwise install Linux.</strong><hr></blockquote>
You should actually go one step further and replace your entire dorm with machines running DOS. You and me scott, we think alike.
<strong>Otherwise install Linux.</strong><hr></blockquote>Yes, because we all know what a superior metadata and file extension handling system Linux has, right? <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />