Snow Leopard Snubs Document Creator Codes

adamengst writes "In this TidBITS article, Matt Neuburg explores how Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard changes how the operating system handles preferred application bindings, dropping support for the creator codes that have been part of the Mac OS from the early days. He also explains how to work around the problem, if you want, for instance, text documents created with BBEdit to open in BBEdit even when TextEdit is the default handler for text files."

Re:Problem?

[gabebear]

It had uses, but I think it did complicate more than it helped.

Example of use:
I have a lot of AVIs, and a handful of them only play in Quicktime, or only play in VLC. I changed the creator code on those files so they open in specific player.

Re:We Know Best

[Overly Critical Guy]

Man, there are a lot of uninformed people posting to this article. Apple has used Uniform Type Identifiers [wikipedia.org] since 10.4 Tiger. Creator codes have been deprecated for years.

Resource fork making a comeback

[yabos]

Actually, I found this kind of strange, but on Snow Leopard, all application executable code is compressed and stored in a resource fork. The reason it's not left in the data fork is because it apparently would confuse Leopard to have a compressed data fork in the app. So now to Leopard, all Snow Leopard apps look like 0 byte files.
See here
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/118359/ars/snow-leopard-indexed.html [getdropbox.com]