Re: Graphic program for MAC

G'day,

>My girlfriend has a new Power Mac 5500 and has trouble looking at pictures
>I send her from my PC. I know nothing about Mac's and would appreciate some
>help in choosing what program for her to use. All she wants to do is view
>pictures sent in .jpg  or .gif form, she doesn't want to modify them in any
>way, only view. For the reason mentioned I would appreciate knowing of any
>shareware programs that would be suitable.

If you don't want to d/load a web browser (as Tom suggested) the two most
common Mac programs for viewing such images are JPEGView (which will read
jpeg, gif, tiff, and pict formats and Graphic Converter which reads a lot
of file formats as well. Both of these are shareware and can be downloaded
at any self-respecting mac shareware archive (like www.macdownload.com,
www.shareware.com).

>The other thing I don't understand about Mac's is that they don't appear to
>show the format the picture might be in, there's no .jpg following the file
>name! Why?

Macs store information about a file's type and the program that created it
in the file itself (in what is called the resource fork). Each file has a
four character file type (eg. TEXT, JPEG or PICT) and a 'creator' type
(which is a four character signature from an application- eg, JPEGView's
creator type is JVWR). When double-click a Mac file, the system will
attempt to find the 'creator' application whose signature appears in the
file's resource fork and launch the file with that. If there are no
programs which can open it present on your system, you will get the error,
"The program that created this file could not be found..."

When you want to display info about a file, the OS looks at the file's
creator code and file type code. It then looks at its own databse of
programs you have on your computer and the file types they can read /
write. If your file's type and creator match those of one on the database,
the document kind is displayed. For example, if a file (type: JPEG,
creator: JVWR) and I choose the "get Info" command, the OS will look at its
database, look up the JVWR program (which is JpegView) and then see what
JPEGView defines the JPEG file type as. JPEGView will have defined the JPEG
file type as a "JPEGView jpg Document" so the Mac will display the Document
'Kind' as being "JPEGView jpg Document". Of course, if the program that
created the file isn't there, the mac will simply call the file "document"
by default.

Chances are, since your files are from a PC, the Creator code has been set
to ???? by default meaning the Mac won't know which program to ask for file
information.

Since the Apple programmers have until now not made the checking of file
types and creator types very easy from the OS, we've had to rely on little
freeware apps like "FileBuddy" or "FileTyper" to see what the creator and
file type of a file are.
If you'd like these I can send them to you. (e-mail me)

So the simple answer is: unless the program which created or last modified
the file is on the computer, the "kind" of document will show up as a
generic 'document'. To get more info on the file type, you need the small
progs (mentioned above) to look at the file type stored in the file.

Hope I didn't lose you...

/\lly


__________________________________________
      Ally Akbarzadeh
      ally(at)netspace.net.au
      http://netspace.net.au/~ally

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