Archive for September 2, 2009

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Creator Codes in Snow Leopard

Lukas Mathis:

I’m not sure whether this is a bug or an intentional «feature», but Snow Leopard has broken «Creator code» file associations. In Leopard and earlier versions of Mac OS X, applications could optionally «own» their files even if the files’ types were associated with a different application; i.e. you could associate RTF files to TextEdit, but if you created an RTF file in Word, that file would continue to open in Word.

It’s a shame, but I can’t say this is surprising.

Update (2009-09-07): Matt Neuburg: Snow Leopard Snubs Document Creator Codes. Some of the commenters seem to be stuck on the idea that supporting creator codes means less support for file extensions and therefore less interoperability. Supporting both seemed like a good compromise to me. Unless I’m missing something, Neuburg’s suggested workaround—changing the bindings manually using Get Info—is shocking laborious because it has to be done for each file separately. Perhaps someone will write a utility to set the 'usro' resource in bulk.