2 replies to this topic

[Mick Matousek]

Having trouble with icons and launching documents? Apple has quietly and abruptly dropped creator codes in Snow Leopard. Now we can be just like a PC. :-(


Snow Leopard Snubs Document Creator Codes

"When you double-click a document in the Finder, how does the system decide what application should open it? The relationship between a document and its owning application is called a preferred application binding. Since the very first day of the very first version of Mac OS X, there has been an uneasy detente between the Unix way of binding documents to applications and the former Mac way, inherited from the early days of the Mac OS. Now, in Snow Leopard, users and developers are complaining that the Unix way is being allowed to run roughshod over the Mac way.
by Matt Neuburg in Tidbits
"

[DanG]

Apparently, that's still debatable.

See the article on macintouch.com here and search for "creator code": <http://www.macintouc...tml#d10sep2009>

Also from that article:

Lawrence Rhodes wrote: But Spotlight in Tiger could search on creator and type codes, and AFAIK this was permanently removed in Leopard despite numerous bug reports, so I'm worried.

Stop worrying, because it wasn't removed in Leopard and still exists in Snow Leopard. For example, the following search finds all .rtf files whose creator code is NISX (that is, they were created with Nisus):

(kMDItemContentType == "public.rtf") && (kMDItemFSCreatorCode == "NISX")

You can use the Raw Query criterion to do that search right in the Finder.

[Mick Matousek]

This article contains additional explanation how Apple is changing file creator codes:
Inside Snow Leopard's UTI: Apple fixes the Creator Code. The comments following the article are interesting as well.