johnston@minnie.me.udel.edu (05/25/91)
Applause all around for ftp.apple.com, System 7 by ftp, and now even ResEdit and MacsBug have been made available thanks to Mark Johnson and all those who lobbied the bureaucrats when the easiest path would have been to avoid getting involved. But getting to the subject: Larry Rosenstein's "Understudy" is particularly neat. It extends the nifty "couldn't find application ... open it with TeachText" behavior of the Finder by letting you pick an alternate application to launch any Mac file type. This can't be done arbitrarily -- MacPaint can't open a Word document, for example. My 'guess' is that applications which support opening files created by other applications will respond favorably to this re-mapping, but it will probably take some poking around to find workable combinations and identify limitations. I won't waste bandwidth by describing how to configure Understudy with ResEdit (that's covered in the Understudy documentation), but just to give an example: to let StuffIt 1.5.1 files be opened by by Compact Pro, all you have to do is insert a new field into the "substitute apps" resource and enter "SIT!" in the Type box and "CPCT" in the creator box. The nice thing about the way this works is that the switch only occurs when the Finder doesn't locate the parent application on a mounted volume. Anyone else have ideas for useful "Understudy" applications? -- Bill (johnston@minnie.me.udel.edu) (Understudy is available as /info-mac/init/understudy-10d3.hqx on sumex-aim.stanford.edu. You'll need ResEdit to configure it.)
marosen@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Mark Rosen) (05/26/91)
I've done a cool thing with understudy. Just like you, I have SIT!
files that I want to open with Compact Pro, because it's so much
faster. But I also need to keep Stuffit around, for those times when
I get a Stuffit Deluxe file downloaded. So what I did was use
Understudy, and put in the "droppables" resource to make SIT! files
droppable on Compact Pro. So now, when I download a SIT! file (which
automatically goes to my "new stuff" folder, I just drag it and drop
it on an alias of CompactPro that I keep in that folder. Now I don't
have to open Compact Pro, then open the SIT! file. It all works
automatically!
--
*************************************************************
Mark J. Rosen | Internet: marosen@elbereth.rutgers.edu
| CIS: 72717.2733@compuserve.com
*************************************************************