Ben Crowell wrote: > MacOS X is phasing out the metadata stuff in favor of 3-character > filename extensions, so one solution is to wait a year -- your users > will mostly be upgraded to X, and the problem will be gone!
Ironically, we have OSX 10.1 and 9.x on almost all the computers. None of the mac people have switched over, hopefully with office and photoshop the conversion will eventually happen. > > >Thus they refuse to open in the original application. > Are you saying that (1) when you double-click on it, it doesn't know what > app to open it with, or (2) you can't open it at all? > Unless the data fork is damaged, the app should still be able to > open it if you first start the app and then do File>Open. I agree, if the app was well designed. However, these apps (Strider and Gene Construction Kit) will not recognize any other filetypes but their own. So if the file is not of the right creator/type it will never show up in the open dialogue. Is there a wacky mac "open apple command control thing" to force an app to open a file? The data is intact because when I add the creator/type info using "a better finder" the file will open. > > Maybe you could also explain a little more about the process by which > users upload their files This is a large database containing our lab's stocks, strains and plasmids. When the researcher creates a new plasmid he or she fills out a web based form with all the important information and also uploads any data files used in making the plasmid. These data files are for the molecular biology programs Strider and GeneConstructionKit. The uploads are done using standard CGI.pm functions and then actually stored in the mysql database as blobs. Thanks, David
