Apple developers It was a
core feature
All is not well among developers in Apple land after the
release of Snow Leopard.
Snow Leopard's abandoned Creator Code metadata which was
used to open a file with its creating application. Apple is convinced that it has invented a superior
alternative for the old Creator Code in order to support a variety of new
features. But word on the news groups is that some developers feel
that Apple has killed off a core Mac-centric feature.
Apple developed a variety of unique conventions which it
felt made the Macintosh easy to use. One of these allowed invisible file metadata to identify
documents using Type and Creator Codes. Each file was tagged with both a Type
and a Creator. This allowed the system
to work out the applications that could open a file and the default application
that should open the file. Basically
any document created in Word would open in Word.
This
was different from Windows which needed a file
extension to know how to open the file. However Creator Code only
worked while documents stayed
on the Mac and didn't go to other operating systems which could not
open them. What has replaced Creator Code is certainly much better
and continues a move away from such code which was started in Tiger.
More
here.