[thechat] Mac question

[Martin]

Kevin Stevens wrote on 16/10/01 9:07 pm

>            Trouble with one of those infernal Mac things again :(

hah!

>            At work we occassionaly get an order from a client who insists
>on sending it as an e-mail attachment with a .htm extension. If I was using
>a PC I could click on the attachment and it would open up in IE and I could
>view it. On my boss' Imac, when you click on it a sort of Notepad type thing
>opens up and just displays the raw HTML, which I can decipher, but my boss
>can't. Any ideas on how I can set up the machine so it opens the file in a
>format that my boss can understand?

Here's the basic thing:
Macs handle files a little more intelligently.

With Windows, each extension is explicitly associated with an application.
Thus .doc are (nearly) always Word files, .xls Excel files and so on.
If you want to remap the association, you can only do so on a global
basis, and of course, every file *must* have an extension.

On Macs, the file type is held in meta-data within the actual file
(each file has a data fork and a resource fork - the resource
fork is the metadata and holds filetypes, custom icons etc).

This allows you to change the filetypes on a file-by-file basis,
so I'll start off with the HTML files I'm working on mapped to
Dreamweaver until I get the design sorted out. Once those files
are being ripped apart into working files, I'll remap them
to BBEdit (without changing the files for other projects).
Once they're in production, I may remap them to a browser.

Similarly, images from my digicam start out as Quicktime
files, then become ImageReady ones, and end up as browser-mapped.

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.

Mail attachments will be allocated filetypes of whatever the
mail app in question feels like. Some may follow similar rules
to default windows mapping, some may not.

Hope that's helpful

Cheers
Martin

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