At 22:19 +0900 6/5/11, Nobumi Iyanaga wrote:
>Well, what has changed between 10.5 and 10.6 is that the "creator" (a kind of resource) attached to each file is no longer working with Finder of 10.6. This is only the extensions, such as ".rtf", ".doc", etc., which indicate the applications that should open files. It is said for example in
><http://www.macworld.com/article/142937/2009/09/snowfiles.html>:


Apple's inventions, file type and file creator. are a part of the Apple file system. Four case-sensitive character metadata items have space in the directory structure of HFS. They're not in the file's resource fork.

They are also not a part of the NEXT operating system which was purchased by Apple and became Apple's OS neXt where the X was kept and just happened to be the roman numeral for 10 as in what follows 9.  The folks from Next, Inc who came to Apple don't like type and creator and the concept has been less and less supported with each release of OS neXt.

I know, my bias is showing. This is being prepared with OS 9.1 on Eudora 5.1 and I drive an '82 Jeep.

We now have Launch Services which is better at least in some minds. Apple no longer needs to keep track of assigned creator codes to avoid duplicates. I'm sure they like that. But when a file is created by a modern application it probably does not set the creator code in the file directory. It may not even have a creator code assigned from Apple. Launch Services is reduced to guessing until you tell it what to do.

The resulting system is more understandable to Windows and  UNIX users. Perhaps that's good.

But why does Finder default to hiding the filename extensions?

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