[thechat] Mac question

[Andrew Forsberg]

>  > Here's the basic thing:
>>  Macs handle files a little more intelligently.
>
>I disagree. They handle files *differently*.

+= 1

As a certified operating system whore I can unhappily say that each 
OS I use has the wrong behaviour at the wrong time in 50% of all 
critical cases.

>  Even raw text files sometimes refuse to open in SimpleText.

You can get around most mac idiocies if you have the right tools. I'd 
hate to be a mac developer without BBedit, for example -- I need to 
use unix line breaks, so I save php / html files as such in bbedit, 
then ftp them somewhere. But this (on my system) seems to require me 
to send it in binary form or the damned ftp client software 'fixes' 
my line breaks for me. When I retrieve files in binary form no mac 
program bar bbedit will touch it. Grrr.

>  An operating system that did it
>intelligently would probably be a mixture of the two.

A perfect / intelligent OS would be a mixture of the three. I love my 
korn shell.

>But it's also easy for me to right-click an HTML file, and choose "Edit with
>ColdFusion Studio", or "Open With: Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word, Choose
>program...". (Within Choose program, I can set whichever application to be
>the default too).
>[...]
>
>  > The way I do the changing is with a Contextual Menu plugin
>  > called More File Info - drop it into a closed System Folder and
>  > it'll get put in the right place. Then when you Control-Click
>  > on a data file, it will allow you to see the current Filetype
>  > and change it.
>
>Is that a standard inclusion with all macs? No one here has heard of it.

That's a 50/50 problem/advantage of Apple's approach: they have tried 
to steer as far from MS's 'we include everything in the OS except 
what we can sell as a costly add-on' as they possibly can. It opens 
doors for third parties, but unless a third party does it well (or at 
all in some cases), the OS seems crippled in comparison with Win.

I think the worst example of this is in the system utility area: the 
disk first aid tool is a joke, and Apple canned their resource editor 
program Resedit way back in 1994 (AFAIK). You can get third party 
tools, but an OS where users can't change what a file associations 
reliably without third party software, or defrag a drive, is a bit 
useless.

Just my 2c

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Forsberg
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