Localized Read Me Files

With Tiger, Mac OS X no longer hides the .app extension, so one can see that the Read Me file included with iTunes 4.8 is, despite its RTF icon, a Cocoa application. Inside it are 14 localized .rtf files. When you launch the application, it uses open to open the correct .rtf file and then quits. The other interesting feature is that since the Read Me application is a bundle, its name can be localized. On my machine, it shows up as Read Before You Install iTunes.app, but on a German system it would say Vor der Installation von iTunes lesen.app. You always see the iTunes4.mpkg file accompanied by a single Read Me in your own language.

When did Apple start doing this [creating Read Me files as applications]? There’s a third-party utility in beta that can create such applications, but I wasn’t aware that Apple had blessed this design or provided its own tool for creating them.

Wildcard Expansion on Windows and Unix

Dan Crevier:

On unix (including Mac OS X shells) wildcard expansion is done by the shell, and then the expanded list of files is passed on to the program being run. On Windows, the shell doesn’t do any expansion, and it’s up to programs to do expansion.

Safari Strip Return Character When Pasting

Pierre Igot:

Thankfully, at some point Apple realize [sic] the problem and fixed it. I don’t remember exactly when. It might have been in Safari 1.2—or Safari 1.3. But they did fix it, in a smart way, by simply stripping the return character altogether when the user pastes a line of text followed by a return character into a single-line text entry field in a Web form.