iPhone bummer

Disclaimer: I do not own an iPhone (nor do I want one so long as it has a cellular phone involved with it).

According to iPhone Central reports that iPhone does not grok creator codes which is a bummer for a lot of Macintosh folks.

For those who don’t know but wanna: the original design of Macintosh specified with it two bits of metadata for every given file. These metadata told the operating system what application created the file and what application views the file (because I may create a JPG with Photoshop and give it to you to view in Preview).

The good news is that this allowed people to be in control when it came to naming files. The bad news is that files often broke when moving to other platforms (the quick fix is to add the extension to a file in Windows).

I’m sad to see this feature missing from iPhone, as it is a sign that individuals are not in control of their data. If I name a photo “picture of me surfing backwards” that has meaning to me, whereas “surfing.jpg” has less meaning to me. A good system should be able to inspect the file and tell me if it is readable by an application on that system. Windows does something similar with its now-defunct Office XML (note: not Office Open XML) formats. In the 2003-version of Office files saved as XML would have a processing directive in them that Windows scanned to determine if an XML file was indeed an Office file with a vague extension. I really liked that functionality, as it allowed my system to have another program associated with XML files, but I guess that sort of thinking didn’t catch on very much so nobody else really adopted it (either that or Microsoft kept the API closed so nobody else could do such a thing).