Snow Leopard – Creator Codes
This is certainly a hot topic amongst OS X users right now, and rather than going into the technical underpinnings that *were* handling it, I will focus on my personal experience with this and a possible alternative path.
I first noticed this after upgrading from OS X 10.5, when I browsed to my Sites directory, and double clicked the index.php, which I needed to edit in Textmate. I grabbed my cup of coffee and took a sip, expecting Textmate to have launched when my focus returned. However, to my surprise, I was looking at my page in Safari. I returned to the Finder, ctrl-clicked and issue the Open With > Textmate. I made the changes to the php file that I intended, saved, and tried again from the top. Again, Safari started…
The most coherent points that I have read on this topic were from John Gruber:
Today, on the other hand, many of the files we work with use common, open file formats: text files, JPEG and PNG graphics, MP3 audio, MP4 video, etc. When you double-clicked a MacPaint file in 1985, there was no question which app you wanted to open it: MacPaint. Today, though, there might be a dozen apps on your system that can open a JavaScript source code text file or an MP3 audio file. “The app that created it” can no longer be assumed to be the answer to the question “Which app would you prefer to open this file with by default?”
The situation is therefore far more complex today. One way Apple has dealt with this complexity is with the fairly-recent addition of the “Open With…” contextual menu in the Finder, which shows a list of apps that claim to be able to open files of the selected item’s type. And there’s always drag-and-drop.
As he mentions, the complexity of file-types has certainly changed, however while Snow Leopard is impressive in many ways, the ctrl-click Open With is not a solution robust enough to effectively handle this. Further, as Gruber states:
Apple could have replaced creator codes with something superior, based on bundle identifiers, but they did not. And even if they plan to do so in the future, there is no good reason for dropping creator code support from Launch Services now, before the replacement arrives.
I agree the bundle identifiers, such as “com.apple.Safari”, have and continue to offer the platform to achieve this, it is just a matter of execution. There are certain files all with the same extension, that I want to open in different applications. While I can assign a System-Wide default by doing Get Info, the complexity of file-types cannot be handled by a single preference. The current solution “Open With” is tedious, as I found last night for example. I had recently created PNG files in Photoshop and wanted to edit them again, by habit I opened them via Finder expecting Photoshop to launch, but was brought back to reality as they opened in Preview. Had creator codes been in place, or a similar setting using bundle identifiers, this would not have been the case. (Yes, I know that ctrl-clicking, Open With > Application, is not that hard; it is the usability that we have come to expect from OS X that this seems to go directly against.)
Apart from a solution utilizing bundle identifiers, which I still think might be the easiest path, the only other similar product solution I have seen is Choosy, which allows you to set preferences for launching the right browser. Again, the drawback to this approach is that by no means, do I want to define the “choices” to choose from such as Preferences. However, as I stated, I find the Open With dialogue choice to be tedious, but the Finder could have a “Similar-to-Choosy option” that would prompt the user with a “Visual Open With dialogue” to choose from the current Open With Applications.
