A few questions I should not have to ask....

[steve harley]

they whom i call Scott Stevenson wrote:
> 
> On Aug 15, 2007, at 8:09 AM, steve harley wrote:
> 
>> most will say don't get your hopes up, but i think the most viable 
>> approach to this, without any API help from Apple, is to work with the 
>> apps themselves -- in other words modify the application resources 
>> (plists) that specify the bindings that apps provide
> 
> Unless you are the developer of an application, you should not be 
> modifying any part of it it. Doing so can muck with normal function of 
> the app, and the user will not understand why.

the concept i outlined falls into that large class of tools 
which, yes, should be used with caution (and which give big 
corporate support departments the heebie jeebies); perhaps in 
your world there are hard & fast rules about such things ... to 
protect us from ourselves, of course!

one reason i suggested the binding-tweaker use a database is to 
store the original bindings so they can be restored if there's a 
goof; at least the application binding process is well documented 
on the info.plist side; i suppose now and then an application may 
depend on a binding for some of its internal bits

the biggest value of such a tool is in simply disabling or 
reprioritizing certain bindings; there is a surprisingly big 
demand for such a manipulations among publishing users, for 
example, who may even have multiple versions of the same app and 
be frustrated about which one is chosen when double-clicking a 
document

removing, for example, the superfluous bindings of JPEG OSType 
and .jpg extension from the info.plist for Real Player is a 
constructive, if tedious, way to do minor cleanup on the user 
experience; i just did it and re-registered Real Player with 
lsregister -R -f, and my Open With menu is now slightly nicer 
than it was before; i can even still drop JPEGs onto RealPlayer, 
though i don't know why i'd want to