WWDC2000 Session 144

Transcript

Kind: captions Language: en good afternoon ladies and gentlemen please welcome the user experience technology manager John Gill NZ will good afternoon and welcome to session 144 this belongs to user experience subtract sort of and the reason for that is that in all of the user experience sessions so far we've been talking about aqua related things so the look and feel of 10 how to properly design icons how to lay out your dialogues these sorts of things that we talked about the aqua overview and some of the other sessions that have occurred so far this week as i said in the aqua overview session the first day of the conference you you know the Macintosh is known as being friendly and easy to use known as being consistent and one of the most sort of notorious behaviors of the Macintosh is that when you you know movement of files around the file system is very easy you can move folders of whole applications and when you move files and documents from applications around you know the Mac always knows which application created it when you double click it it knows which apt to launch and these sorts of things and it never sort of forgets these these types of relationships this session is going to talk about a lot of it's going to talk about this subject matter and it's going to we're going to talk about packages which are new for 10 well they're on nine but their new they're they're important for 10 there's a packaging your applications putting all the pertinent in one place so that users have a really great user experience moving those things around as one unit and we're also going to talk about the relationship of documents to applications and so to welcome on stage to talk about this material I'd like to call our no gore doll who comes from the user experience engineering team at Apple [Applause] example clicker good afternoon everyone so notice is a few companies session you probably are wondering a lot about what the what we're thinking and I hope that by the end of the session will have answer of that question and that you'll feel better by the default topic my name is a homie brother oh and work in the user experience Department and I'm going to talk to you today about two main things the first one is what we roughly called packaging and it means how you put your application together I'd appear to the user as I mentioned as part of the user experience even though it's not may be directly involved directly at the pixel look on screen but it's definitely part of the user experience the other thing I'm going to talk about is the double click user experience in what happens when you double take again that's more like a behavior but it's a very important one in Mac OS has always had a very good user experience that regarding obviously for making changes in micro stomach which I'm going to talk about so back in the old days an application was a single file and it was very easy when you want it to install the application you should dragged it that was it you had everything with it everything used to be a resource for candle if you remember that it was years ago with the introduction of Power PC the code portion got to move to the data port so the data forks are the code itself and then in the resource for Q at the resources for the application the string that you need to be localized the user interface and so on today on Mac OS 10 that still works you can still have that you can still up your applications in one single file data for contents the code which was for contain the resources and you can have either carbs here RB or pls key resource and I'll talk about that one little bit more detail in a while to tell the system that you're not just the classic application but that your carbon application and that we should not try to launch you in the carbon invert the classic environment but just director environment that's like the minor difference between what we may have had before and what we have in microwave 10 as far single fire application the thing about singleton applications though is that contrary to this very simple picture like just one an icon and everything looks simple and all that now there's what you're more likely to see something like that where you have maybe one type of the application sure but you have a lot of auxiliary file next to the application whether they'll be the help system to help contact some sample code some sample documents or sample code if you're doing a development environment and also the stuff that kind of makes it more difficult for the user to know actually what is this post double click and also that makes the application or fragile because it means that you know if they move the wrong file the application will not lunch anymore and you know that that's the kind of experience that may happen on some other operating systems that we don't want that to happen on my quest and so we're doing things to fix that go back to the good old simplicity that we had before and to do that we're introducing the concept of application bundle let me just tell you that apologize in advance that we haven't been very consistent in our terminology you may have heard the term package and bundle and use sometimes interchangeably we're going to try to be more consistent from now on we promise so we're going to talk about application bundle to talk about the way of an application is packaged and we're going to talk about file packages to talk about documents that defend a similar format but bear with me bundle package it's all the same thing so what's the bundle it is a directory instead of being a single file as we had before it is now a directory and to know that it's a directory that actually is contented application there are three ways that we can identify it the first one is you can set a bit as a special bit in the HFS metadata that and indicate that this is a bundle folder and that's likely the bundle bit which have been unused it was only useful documents with it until micro f85 like oh it's nine likewise nine but now it actually means that the entire folder is to be considered one unit if you will one bundle there's also a special file that we looking for inside directory and if we find it we know that the package it's the second way to do it I'll talk about that file in more details in a little while and finally there's another way that this can be indicated is by using an extension that realtor extension dot app there you go wait and it's not over that can tell the system that you know this is also a package even though it may not have the bundle bit set and even though it may not have the package in full file there the reason for the extension there is just in case you know the application gets moved around and so maybe a file system that doesn't know how to deal with that with the HFS where the data and the bunnelby get some set for some reason or something like that so it's like like more safety precaution anything else important thing to remember that app is not required got two other way 20 k let your application is actually application okay all right now there are two bugs left in DP for the way you would ship it right and one of them is the way sometimes you actually need me to put it that app to make you understand another thing that we are not doing in that in the teepee for right now is that if your application as the app will actually displayed in the file system and we want to change that later so the few caveats with the p4 we're not quite done that's the direction that we want to go where you can indicate that something is a package one of three ways you choose if you are familiar with the previous version of my quest and medicine server and before there was another format for bundles that was slightly different that's what I'm going to talk about that format is still supported we still recognize you know with some of the Senate but we don't recommend you using it so you can just you know if you don't know about it you can just forget about it and if you are using it should consider using the new format now so what's inside this directory we have multiple binaries for different runtime environments multiple localizations and all the auxiliary files that may not be that important for the user to see and that could break the advocate get moved around what's important about all this though is that we want to get back to that don't you have everything that makes an application be presented as a single icon that's the goal to go back to the simplicity that we had 16 years ago even though think as chandel a bit in the meantime so the way we're doing this that we're having this box with all this neat content inside of it but it's a nice way to put everything together and to carry everything together around and you can use it as a whole without having this way to get to dig through it and that's what the user is going to see that's what user experience ones we have once we have 1i connell application something very simple that doesn't mean that you know you can't have any files outside of it maybe it makes sense that we read me next to it or something like that but again nothing important should be outside of it now let's see what's inside the box we're going to open it and I'm going to talk about all the components of what goes inside the package this is kind of what it looks like i'm using this fictitious like it's not the fictitious it's on the CDP for CD but it's a sample app called sketch and at the top you have the sketch directory which is what it really is and inside of it there are a number of sub directories which I'm going to detail you'll notice that I'm using two colors on the slides the things that are in yellow are the things that for which the system expects the name to be what is indicated here you can't choose it to be anything you want the things that are in white is left up to you so that's going to turn this slide on the others i'm going to happen after that so the first thing I think it's better than most I guess is the binary they actually the actual executable for your application where it's located is inside content which is basically where most everything is and inside of there there is a directory that's called Mac OS with no space that contains that expected to contain the binary for mac OS 10 this binary can be either CFM or micro base binary it doesn't matter both either will work and it can contain a resource box if you want one the case of CSM you really do when it's not going to work so well and it gives us macro you don't have to in general I know that there is some concern about data to that resource working some confusion that what we're saying there what we want to have is a we want to have something that works really well in environment that don't support resource for that well you know like other operating systems or the volume format so that we can operate nicely with all those different environments and one way to make that easier is to not rely on the resource for so much certain minerals never use resource for it means if you can live with that resource for you can do everything with you today without the source port or using a different format of the resource for which I'm going to talk about then that means that your application for example can live on the server you know the doesn't thing is that doesn't know anything about h FF meta data and can still work there that means that you can use some wonderful utilities such as tour to a package or application and ship it around or you'll be easily FTP or whatever so there are some advantages to that and you know we're encouraging you to do that as much as possible that's what we're trying to do on the system all the system we're trying to have everything works potentially without relying on AFF although for the system is designed to work less on HSS so that's the binary you can have resources in there but there's a better place for it I'll talk about it in a while so what you recommend at you have here is just the code that's necessary to make application do something next it's a very important file and I'm going to talk about it several times today we call it the plist or inputted plist sometimes it's also called info dash microwaves that plist and the reason for that because you can have a generator on version of specific Kimiko expand or version of specific to another runtime environment then it's basically always the same file it's an XML file that contains a lot of information about your application the system uses that to basically know everything there is to know about your applications what's your name when were you born what documents you have to open everything you know how to do which icon should be displayed for application and so on and I'm going to some detail about the content of that violence in a while package info is another file in there that is very simple file it states by a basically contentious type and creator which is also information that's available in the info that period it's redundant and the reason why we have it here is only for performance reasons so that we can very quickly find out what the typing creator of a package is without having to pause the xml file necessarily so it's an optimization but that site is important because I talked about it earlier the presence of this file can help us figure out that something that looks like a directory in fact should be presented as a single file whether it's an application or an application bundle or file package so if you don't have a creator for some reason your application doesn't have a creator because its legacy application for whatever reason that's okay you can still put you know for ? of the Creator that will work and we'll just use it the type which in that case would be a ppl an application finally in the resources directory we have everything else and then show you what that is the first thing is going to be something that's all your apps they're going to have which is the icon for the application itself the plist contains a reference which is the name of the file that contains the icon and you're going to look for that file inside we froze it so here you see the split in white it means the name can be whatever you want but it will have to be the same one that specify need appeal is of course as we know to find it if you have icons for your documents as well that's what it would be as well and the plist again would indicate what the name of those files are so that we know where to find them you can have your own stuff in there as well if your application to both filters of some sort of export filters or you know graphic filters or any kind of additional data think that the user can install optionally that kind of stuff you can put that in there as well and can have sub directories you can organize that however you want exactly the same way that you would organize your application today if it was in the just in one big folder so that's up to you we don't impose any organization in jail you can also have the file that's going to contain resources and then the Macintosh sense of the world and my quest toolbox sense of the world is that if you have a file in there that is the same name as your binary that it is that arrow softly at the end we will open that the medically for you because we'll know about it and we'll figure out it you prolly once you have used that file so before I was telling you know if you want you can have binary that doesn't contain any of the resources of just content the code you can do that have the resources in there and when your battery gets launched this part will be open automatically for you so that you know you don't really have to do anything it works like it's always did even though the things on living in two files now one thing is important about resources whether it's this particular resource file or others you may have that with DP for we're introducing a new format for resources and that format and gun to your feeds it's a resource porch that lives in the data fork so it's exactly as if you had you know what you would have any resource for the same binary stream if you will accept is throw in the data fault that's exactly how we going to call that that we thought isn't data for something like that but the advantage of that the reason why we did that is that what it means is that any body you know any OS that's out there today any utilities or whatever knows about those things they can back back them up you can compress them you can encrypt them they can do whatever they want with them it's just a fire for them it doesn't matter and the resource manager now has routines that allow you to open those things and create them and regulate them and so on but again as I mentioned if you just put that file in that location with that the name of your binary data RC will just open it for you whether it's stored in the data form with a resource for it doesn't matter you'll just get your resources that's what counts for you the resources that are in this particular location that I've just met with roses directory are things that should not be localized and sometimes it happens maybe they're the logo to application in there maybe there is some various data that you need to have in there for whatever reason and but those that are in there should be things that I'm not localize that will stay the same no matter what the user preferred localization is the things that do need to get localized however go into a folder that that's called for example English the approach obviously that's not the only name it can have you can have often relatively generic names with indicate the regions like English and French and Japanese and you can also have more specific one if you want so that you can have fine little a great deal of control for that you could have for example the French Canadian version which is the French French version or the Belgian version or whatever and the system will pick which one to use based on the user preference you don't have to do anything as long as you provide those directories the system will do the right thing and we'll pick whatever is available so the user said you know I really like to have new my applications in French and you happen to have a French localization that's what will be used if you don't have one will fall back to according to the user preferences and if you only have one that's the one we'll use and again you don't really have to do anything for that except follow this layout for your application so that allows you to ship one application that contains multiple localization for your different markets very efficient way of doing it inside this directory that the special file that you can have that's called localized that are a toffee and some of the when i talk before scheduled at our SRC it can be either a file that contains a resource fork which will be sources in it or it can be as filed its to delhi pork that contains the resources yeah and just like the other file it will be open automatically so you'll have both the non localized resources as well as the localized resources open by the time that your application is running and the right ones too without any effort on your part if you have other type of data that needs to be localized for example of help file you can put it in there as well and you can use some API to find those files and to find the right ones to find the english one versus the french one you know depending on the user choices and so on there i appear to do that that makes that make it really easy okay so that's kind of watching resources a lot of information that we're really hiding from the user because they're not interested in the details most of the time an overall depth what an application bundle looks like on my quest m directory a lot of structure all the files some have to be there because the system uses them others there are left for you to put whatever you need to put in that folder when we introduce my quest line we introduce what we call app packages we're calling them bundles now get the same thing they haven't changed to the name and the structure is slightly different and that might have confused you when we were talking about bundle and packages and you know looking at the technology thing hmm looks like this I look Andy Petree it looks nothing like it so what does it all mean that's what it looks like a mech website oh that's what we recommend that it looks like a microwave sign my cosin you as much fewer constraint about what the layout of your directory is mostly because the system does less for you the only concerns that you have really for mac OS 9 is that you should set a bundle bit on the folder so that's the only thing at mac OS 9 recognizes and at the top level of this folder you should have an alias to your application to the binary that you want to use a microwave slime it might be the same one that you are using a mac OS 10 ish or carbon application i can run in both environments or you can choose to have a complete difference one to have an application that completely tailored to micro s9 and I've a completely different application running for my quest and complete different binary i should say but from the user point of view would be the same app this elliot should be relative that's the challenges technote i'll give you the reference we take notes we can find more details about that so that again the thing can be moved around the areas will always point to the right look binary one thing that were enhancing over what we are describing the tech notes previously is the addition of it's just a suggestion nine really it helps make things more consistent and that's the addition of the content directory with a mac with classic director inside of it and the reason for that is that because it's going to mesh well with microwaves 10 so and then you can add something that looks like this the alias contents microwaves classic and then in there your binary and whatever size you have of course well nine you don't get support for multiple localization it just worked like it does on line and if you want if you're doing a carbon application and you want that application to be able to run both online and on 10 you can merge those two models together so you get something like this on this side over there you have microwaves classic that contains all the stuff that's needed for nine the binary help file whatever is made it there you have the l.e.s that points to somewhere in there that will be used by Mac OS 9 on the other side you have the mac OS and full of pillows packages for resources that are used by 10 what's important though is that at the top you have only one item when the user double-click on that item that icon that they've seen in the finder whether it's on 90 110 the right thing happens although it's going to be something completely different depending on the runtime environment but from the user point of view the right thing happens then again they can move it around and all the pieces come together they don't have to worry about you know I don't know if I need that file you know I don't know that doesn't look right to me the implication doesn't work anymore don't want that at this point I'm going to give you a little demo to show you what a package application bundle looks like if we can yeah fun running classic do this its work kind of so let's have a look at that so I have this CD here that content as a city that I've inserted in the machine that's a fake thing I just press that last night but it can give you an idea of the things you can do now with microwave stand for one thing you'll notice that you know have a background for my for my app and it spread variable for icons that are put together you know its temperature like them and move them around it's so picture so we can take advantage of that to make some interesting thing and then there are a few things on our the top level of the city like the icon for my app is actually a nap bundle and goodies that contains like the Installer stuff and the additional stuff that user might want to install and just a readme file for the ideas that you know user just but your app it put a city in every the reason if they want to probably will and they just drag the app maybe you know these in some cases you might not even need to have an installer so you know keep it two things as simple as possible so let's have a look inside that application here they do get info on it we can have a look at when what's inside and I'm going to give you a few tricks but you might want to write down because I don't think we've actually put that in the documentation and it is useful during your development in get info there are several panels that apply to this item one of them thats particular interesting is application file cannot be even at your watch inside but sometimes you really want to look inside the folder and we used to have a button vp3 but to do that that we removed in DP for it might come back but in the meantime very important and that's where you want to write down you want to press the option key while you double-click on the icon there so new in DP for is a relapse service that launcher actually quickly and make it that another track get info double-click there you go I'm playing with fire and paying for it and you're going to know why it in a second so that's the content of my package I'm doing it leads you here as we can disclose the thing and see what's inside it this is the package that that was designed to work both on nine and ten so the top level here it has an alias to the application that i want to use online that application itself is in there like contents micros classic and now that's where i'm playing with fire i'm actually going to try to launch it to show you something that's kind of cool this believe it or not is actually mac draw 0.9 look at the date Olga's 34 and it still runs on mac OS 10 so the point of this is that you can have very different app for your mac OS 9 version that you have on my quest and cool if you want of course you can have a carbonized version that's going to work both online and on 10 the other stuff that you have in here and here are some custom folders or specifically my applications color palettes here the very important info that plist i got them all this stuff about my app now later on i'll go into more detail what's in there and then in there i have the binary for my microwave send version that of my app this happens to be a cocoa a java cocoa app what this one obviously isn't so we see we support multiple runtimes that sounds cool the package info file that tells us about the typing creator of the thing and then plug in another folder for my app and then sigh resources a bunch of other file that my app needs to have access to some tiff files that contain different pictures displayed in the user interface of this app the localized version of the resources the name is a cocoa app and so on so you can go in there move things around you know do whatever you want with it of course you don't want to encourage your users to do that but sometimes they may need to actually get access to that and we'll give them access but that should really be the back door version of configuration of your app I mentioned that we also support multiple localization so the way that this works is that in the system preferences there is one of the elements of system preferences international and international you have the list of languages and the user can order that however they want if they want to have french first they can have french first then English those whatever what that will do is that that's will have a direct effect when they double click on their app the system will use that list to figure out in which order to look for languages so here if I have put French for the first thing the system we look for with the differential localization open that and and use that so that's where those things are our control okay I'll come back this mission later there is a session later on this afternoon that will talk more details about that in particular it will talk about the EPI that you can that you have that give you access the content of those things we can go in there and ask for files and we look in the right director info on this afternoon session 157 all a 15 p.m. which are interested in that and what kind of api's are available to get access to that go to that session ok now I'm going to move on to another topic soak the bed how to take it you're up together and now i'm going to talk about what happens when you double click on document so that's what we call duck binding what it means is the binding of an application to a document in other words that the double click user experience that's a very important part of the mac with experience and that's something that you really care about a lot so i'm going to give you five easy rules to follow for doc binding and if you follow them nobody gets hurt and everything's cool first one all the apps have granite that app and it cannot contain any spaces the spaces are evil for unix you cannot use flash the space right hey that's the first one come on a formal all the apps must live inside the siphoning / app otherwise you know we don't know about those apps and it's a small front did someone applause their old files must have a three-letter extension the vid they don't we just don't know what to do with them there is no creator inside that's something of the past and we're moving forward toward three-letter extensions no more kid or inside their evil and finally am just in the center here and finally to install an app very easy that's actually what they do and some other opening system so for those of you who are believing everything you read in rumor sites don't that's not quite how it works what we want to do in my quest and that regard ugh by name is to preserve the ease of use of Mac OS 9 very conscious of that and obviously there's something as we want to preserve moving forward with microwave stand but that's not where we want to stop just don't want to do something that's just as good as microwaves line they're a bunch of the thing is want to take into consideration the first one is we want to play nice with others what I mean by that is that we want to interoperate really well with other operating systems because we realize that we don't have a hundred percent market share yet we're working on it so there are other operating systems out there and it's important that files that get created on our printing system or that your applications if they're stored on you know remote servers and so on work and like don't get in the way of the administrator of those of those servers and so on if you are if you have if you know something straight administrators of those types of service today you know that they don't always like what when they have mac users that get on the servers because we can surely credit all around and so we want to behave better in that regard also we took up two different volume format as if it is a great volume format you know it has very modern it has multiple fork expensive metadata also the very nice features that we want to preserve and you know that's why HSS is the main volume format for mac OS 10 but at the same time we want to be able to live in an environment where there are other volume formats that may not be as smart as HSS is so we want to fit in and in this wonderful universal we also want to work in an environment that's much more network than it used to be you know its users can login we want them to be able to have their different preferences not to have that you share that necessarily and that requires to make some changes which are going to more detail and finally even though the mac OS 9 user experience for double-clicking is great we think that there is some improvements that can be made in particular for more advanced users think that for you know novice users it works great always does mostly what you expect like when it tells you that can find this app and then app and you know that you use red today to change the type in creator the side front of minor details it's pretty good but we want to make it better in particular from love it for more advanced users in other words wanted to make easier to use and more powerful at the same time and that's not easy let me tell you that's not easy that's what we're trying to do with mac OS in general that this is part in an area where the ease of use is very important and adding new features also is long overdue so how does it work other duck burning work a very important concept in dog biting is the concept of the document type which didn't really exist in Mac OS 9 before yet the file type but you know the files that doesn't tell you anything about other ways that you can represent the what the format of this document is one way is the file type that's definitely true but it might be other ways for example extensions which are use on other operating systems on the internet more frequency and in some cases just accountant to the file you know maybe there's a header they contain some signature of something like that can tell you some information about what this file format is so we've abstracted that by having this concept of the document type that's just a string of its rear length that defines that you define those strings inside your information p list after an example in a while what it looks like but for each type of document that you know that basically you'll have an entry and this entry will be indexed by that document type string other info the typing creator that can be used to identify the type of the document again this is specifically TFS stored in the h FF meta data we support that if it's there you know if you have an hf as well in format and the document as a seventh-grader of course we're going to use that but we also want to work when it's not there so it's optional because HFS might not always be around where your documents are stored ok so it's an extension is something new to mac OS mike receiver had the concept of file extensions profane we're introducing that and trying to have a life support for it the definition of a file extension on that quest and is it's something at the end of a file name it's up to 32 characters in length after a dot thing to keep in mind about extensions that there are not localized we don't have to worry about you know having different version of the extension for different localization all that that's not the case it's not intended to be localized there are not case-sensitive either and the characters that you can use an extension is actually it's really reduced you can use a to z 0 to 9 and the characters dollar % underscore and Kilda and if there are any other characters that you really really want to use for some reason let us know about it so I think that we district covering enough and the reason why we're limiting the character set is because by doing that we want the user still have the freedom to use anything else not that basically an example of that is that we have also another limitation that if an extension is only one or two digits in it we don't consider it to be an extension and why do we do that well because we want to allow you to add something like first paint 10 and not ever confuse and say does Oh what kind of extension is that and what is an application that can open the door so that 0 is not an extension that your SB is not an extension either can you tell me why it has spaces in it exactly to be continued that the dot is not an extension either for a number of reasons because that is not valid character depending on the I you profit met actually control is empty some valid extensions on the other hand are the always popular XD mp3 d6 food at sea but that's an extension that you know might advertise and used before and Doug that surf and and Doug that surf and I can't say the case that you see the difference right there the same that the same extension but like I say the case doesn't matter as far as extensions are concerned and it's another example that shows you that you know if you want you can have you don't such as three characters in what's up to 32 so you can use your entire entire application name is make sense of course if you already have some extensions that are defined for your document types because your application is cross platform for example and you had to deal with those issues before now use the same thing that you have on the double platform the whole point of this is to make interoperability easier so don't have extensions that are Mac os10 specific because that would be kind of missing the point you want something that's my question specific you know you typing creator don't use extension okay this is something that we're going to try to implement as soon as possible but it's not yet in deep before and that's the hint and I want to talk to you about that because that's something that I think is important to aware i can think about it because we could do some interesting stuff with that here is basically it's a sequence of light in the the first k the first 7 24 bytes of the document that can help us identify what the document is that's also referred to as a magic cookie in unix that's one of the good things with uniquely are awesome and that's also something that's used sometimes not all that not all popular documents formats have that but very secondly they do for example acrobat PDF files the first four bytes of the neck or bad PDF files are always percent PDF if you just look at this full bite you have a PDF file even if you have no extension and the typing creator has been left for some reason so putting it all this together if you actually if you have a document that's just called image that JPEG without any type and creator you know maybe that's something that you just downloaded maybe to mp3 from metallic shell something well we can still tell from the extension that the type is jpg file if you have the type we're going to use that and even if there is no extension if you even if you just called image again the same thing we're going to know that it's a JPEG file and finally you could have just the name image no expansion and no typing creator by looking at the proper byte sequence the beginning of the file which was jpg happens to be ffvi 250 we're going to know still there is a JPEG file what's important it doesn't do those three cases no matter how the end result is the same we know that it is a JPEG file and once we have that information we go on to the next step which is going to be to find the application to use to open that thing the way this works on mac OS 9 is that there's a internist that's the database that needs to be rebuilt every so often it's a per volume database which was a problem for us because we wanted something that would follow the user rather than you know work differently depending on where you log on you know and one machine does something and other that something a bit different so really something that had more customization that was more per user and also there were others through the mutations like it was very difficult to extend to add any sort of information beyond but it's already knew it was already trained at my tits what is holding and it only knows about typing creator and the extension for that so basically the desolate it is to continue to be used by micro-fine and classic the mac OS and finder still maintains it if you copy an application that have a mac OS 9 application for example between two volumes Mac os10 finder will do the same thing that the micros 900 did which is to update the death of database appropriately so that they're all synchronized but it's only used as a fallback when there is no other information the preferred mechanism that we use now is a registration mechanism grab the difference with the death of their days which means it before we know about an application we have to run into it there are a few well-known locations which is basically where we are going to recommend users that is throw their app let's not give you slash bin slash apps and I'm not going to have to put them there they can read put them anywhere they want but the few well known locations will go in there and we'll look to see if there are any new applications I've been installed anything else change and we'll use that kind of as a basis will start with that as a starting point like the applications folder and in DP for there are several applications folder for you too many applications folder will clean that up eventually but will still look in those epic those places where we have the applications folder if some for some reason and application has not been registered yet launching it will do that and sometimes just looking at it will do that the point is even though there is this registration step that's necessary very often you won't even see it worst case what can happen the double click on this document and it needs an application we've never seen before we're going to ask you you know I don't know about this document where's the app for that I'm going to find the app and that will be it will remember from now on you know oh yeah that app okay fine and as a side effect before you register all the avatar that one next to it too because we'll figure out and maybe do some other interesting stuff in there okay when we run into an application we try to learn as much as possible about it we remember where it lives and we look inside the plist to extract all the information in there such as what is the signature of the application the bundle name is version number of creation date etc and we're going to use subsequently that information to find back which application we supposed to vouch so that for example unlike which is under the limitations database today it's basically the last application that the purchaser that's win and the registration the disabilities is non-trivial so that means that if you have a version of photoshop for into the top five in the same days you double click on something and the photoshop document and sometimes one version with lounge sometimes another version we launched and you never know which one so because we have now all these additional information such as the version number and creation date and so on that allows us to give preference to more recent version over older versions for example the application signature if you're a carbon developer you may be familiar with that already 24 character code I will remind you that there are some invalid ones that you're not supposed to use which are 0 for ? and four spaces if for some reason you don't have a signature which can happen to be your note the cocoa app we never had a signature and you know use for question marks when you don't know what to use we encourage you to register your app signature and to get one at the end of the talk I have a URL that you can go through to do that so if you don't have a signature 3 easy to get and it can be useful to have there are two ways that the bundle information the binding information can be specified one is the way that it's always been done using a bndl resource and all its related resources 28 which five times you know that what the icon for those file types are supposed to be and that's pretty much all you can specify using of the MDL is rather limited we still support that if you're a carbon application or a classic application will find out that information register that and you know will live with it but if you do that that means that you have no way of telling us all by the way those PDF files okay sure they can have the signature PDF space you know but I also know how to deal with them if you find the father that the extension dot PDF that you know download from the internet whatever so with the BND lv throws you can't tell us all that with the plist you can the way you use the plist so again you have two choices depending on how your application is packaged if your package is a single file as your application might be to their mac OS 9 then you just added plsc resource that contains the same content that and in for the police would otherwise you can just have the info that plist file and there that's what's inside the info that police file it has a number of keys with an XML file as I mentioned before the number of keys and different values you have something such as the name the identifier which kick which due to uni key so that we have a unique identifier for your application other information signature version getting fostering etc and then for each type of documents that you know that you specify what the type name is the icon files use but the valid extension for the type are there might be more than one think about HTML and HTM for example the u.s. types and the role and the role is kind of something interesting you can specify whether you add actually doesn't know how to handle this type of document but just note about them can provide an icon for example or whether you can actually view them or just edit them or print them or prying runtime services so there are different again the desire hints that you can provide us that can help us choose which application is that even what the user wants to do and at this point I'm going to show you what the plist looks like you try to do that quickly I'm going to going to use a BB edit for that why not so I'm going to go inside the directory of my app here surfin suspended app compound and I'm gonna have to say oh I want any fighting there and that's my cue list here let me make this text me bigger so you see you don't lie it's an XML file I've edited comment too because you can add comments in there you know next to for your app you know refer to do whatever you want there but can have some comments and you have the different keys so the bundle name for example this one is actually an important one because that's the key that we use to know what to put in the top left of the menu here so that's what we call the short name of the application so user visible name the identifier the type and creator and so on and on and on and on and so here you have the list of all the documents that the this application knows how to deal with kind of what it looks like and then there's a little bit more and I'm going to talk about in a minute I have a few more slides to go through and I'd like to have some time for Q&A so I'm going to go a little faster fasten your belt all right so here very quickly we're 41 few examples about how you would work better that you have in the command created by a carbonyl classic app type in creator and the user did not do any customization look just a quick word about that it will be possible for user to either globally say I want all my HTML files to always open with Dreamweaver no matter no matter who they were created with that would be an option that's not in DP for yet we'll have that by the time we shave hopefully so that's one way that you can that user can override something and you can also do that on the five by five basis or you could say this file I created it in Dreamweaver but now from now on I wanted to open in explorer and you can do that without using resident engineering the creator and all that all that stuff so if there is none of that no use a customization you double click on it well look for the most recent application with a given creator and we'll use that it's exactly the behavior that you would have to then micro it's fine that's kind of like the vanilla case very simple if you download the file from the internet and this file is no typing creator and let's say the engine dot PDF and again in those special user settings we will look see which applications know well first we'll find out that PDF what type is that we'll find out if acrobat PDF documents and then again we'll use the most recent app that knows how to deal with those type of document now here's the case where the user has specified an override I said there is no typing creator the extension that HTML but the user has said I want all my HTML files to open with internet explorer in general except for this one that should open with Dreamweaver follow me there but it's kind of like you have several levels of override the user can provide definitely more for advanced user but it's an important feature for some of our customers and in that case when you double click on it dreamweaver will open it coalition bowl the q words the bet installation now that we have this block with all the stuff in it well have you put stuff in it you have to open the box not necessarily in the plist there are a few additional keys that you can provide they can be very useful those keys can provide us information about what items can be installed optionally in your application where those items are supposed to be installing your application and where we can find them too so for example you can specify a source for whether files will be coming to come from and a list of those files and for each of those files I'm going to specify the name of the item is you can specify the script description that's optional you can specify where on the CD for example this file is to be found where it's supposed to be installed and whether the item should be just copied over or what an installer should be run which case you say the reaction should be open and we just launched installer for that item let me show you what it looks like so if i go back to my plist some other information that i have in there is the installation information so that's the key were thinking about it done on the solar key info here i specify where the source of the files i want to install is in decay in this case it's a volume thats called surf can describe is my installer CD and then i have a list of items here for example i have a list of color palettes my signatures application that users can install this is the path on the CD where those items are stored and this is where they go inside my bundle so no matter where the application is that's where they are installed and now the specific items in this color palette category that describes the different items and here have been very simple just given the file name for all the items you could also specify a description and so on and optionally some other key such as you know whether the item should just be copied over open that's what I was talking about earlier if you want you're going to get very simple which is what I did here and justify the minimum which is just the file name here i have the same thing for another category which is plugins exactly the same kind of information there so once you have all that let me show you what you can do with it i'm going to quit my goal and let's see close this guy put some applications so all your unfold that and all it means I just dragged it over really not that complicated I'm going to go back to the application files panel that I showed you earlier and this pups are different categories of things one of them is a list of localization so for example the user could decide to install just English that's what they want or just one localization and if there are others that are available at a later time they can just click the install button to add them to their application or to remove them if they don't want them anymore so that's a default category that's always there and those are the two others that i've added i've shown you in the plist the color palettes in the plugins those are the files that are specified in my pillow so that's what gets displayed here and you see here on the status column it tells you whether the item is already installed or not if it's not installed you can just selected I have the CD in the computer which is right there we go back to my app and if I just click here and click install going to look on the CD it has copied it with class because it's a small file and wow the same way you can remove something if you don't want it there anymore and so same thing with plug-in so that gives the user some very easy way to do some very limited installation that doesn't mean that you don't need an installer anymore you might still want one but that is for some very simple things it allows the user to do some installation without having to worry about you know messing up something because they get access to the contents of the directory directly okay so a few things for you to do define a type they also thing about extension for your documents again we want to play nice with all the files system and operating systems out there you should consider having a unique signature for your application answering well let's refer your applications also for your document format if it's an existing document of document format may not have this option but if it's a new one really think about it which is your signature for you app that's the URL i was talking about you can go there to register your signature make sure it doesn't conflict with someone else and finally really seriously consider using a plist either as a single file or even better as an application package I hope I've showed you the advantages that we can have to end that you know all work together and improving the user experience if you use application packages and info please to tell us more about your application basically that's what it's all bad if you are still thirsty for more information charge few resources technote 1118 describe the mac OS 9 packages which are called bundles now that's the URL where you can find it and on the DP for CD at this path there's a system overview that go into what I've talked about and you can go back to see what the keys are and so on so it goes into more detail but that's again on your DP for CD and at this point I'd like to ask basically done with what I had to tell you today thank you for attention you