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My favorite part so far: > Every application must have a unique signature by which the Finder can identify it. The signature can be any four-character
by lioeters 7y ago
My favorite part so far:
> Every application must have a unique signature by which the Finder can identify it. The signature can be any four-character sequence not being used for another application on any currently mounted volume (except that it can't be one of the standard resource types).
> To ensure uniqueness on all volumes, you must register your application's signature by writing to: Macintosh Technical Support Mail Stop 3-T Apple Computer, Inc. 20525 Mariani Avenue Cupertino, CA 95014
So one had to correspond by mail to get a unique application ID issued manually. Makes sense, considering the technical limitations at the time, but it makes me wonder whether other PCs/OSes had a better solution. Also, I see that the application approval process has always been a pain to this day..
- buserror 7y agoYou didn't /have/ to really. I was a mac developer for 20+ years, and I never did 'register' them officially... even pretty big commercial apps wouldn't -- it was easy enough to have a unique sequence; one of the basic rule was that all lowercase ones were Apple. I always thought that the 'creator codes' and other use of that four character sequence system was a great feature. It was gradually lost with osx. Fun fact: All compilers for Mac had language extensions to deal with four character sequences, like 'AbCd' in C would be an integer with ('A'<<24)|('b'<<16)|('C'<<8)|'d'. Beats 0xdeadbeef and 0xcafef00d!