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Tuesday, February 18, 2003
17:10 - Key Feature

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There's one rather glaring problem with Keynote that I've seen so far. It's not a bug, per se; it's more of a design choice, and kind of a benighted one. It's that the default filename extension for Keynote saved files is .key.

Lots of programs already use .key for their files. SSL certificate-generation programs, for example, use .key files (or perhaps it's something to do with SSH-- I forget); such files will now show up with Keynote icons, and open up in Keynote when double-clicked. And if those programs themselves depend on their files having .key extensions, or (even worse) if they try to open them automatically on a periodic basis or something, Keynote is going to get invoked inappropriately a lot.

See, this is exactly what I mean when I talk about how horrible an idea filename extensions are. Particularly three-letter extensions; after all, how many unique and meaningful combinations of three alphanumeric characters are there? At the very least I would have expected Apple to choose an extension that didn't impose that ridiculous length limitation on itself, like, oh, I don't know-- .keynote comes to mind. (At least Apple made it so that saved files hide the extension on a per-file basis, so you at least don't have to see it tacked on to the end of the filename.) I mean, totally aside from the collisions with software that already uses .key files, one would think they'd have realized that ".key" implies a meaning completely other than that of the word "keynote". What are you supposed to infer from a filename like "Sales Presentation.key"? It sounds like a teacher's answer sheet.

(Aside: the .key "files" are actually OS X-style bundles, or folders with all the individual items packed inside them in a navigable format. Not that that really matters for the purposes of this discussion.)

Now that Apple has thoroughly eschewed Type and Creator codes as the means of assigning file types, they're going to have to bear the burden that comes with filename extensions. They've handled most aspects of it quite well, I'm pleased to say, what with the per-file extension-hiding bit and the new "Open with" association. But that doesn't solve the problem of collisions of well-known filename extensions; and if Apple stubbornly sticks by .key as the extension for Keynote files, then they'll be echoing Microsoft's appropriation of the .doc extension (previously used for all kinds of text documents, not just Word files). Only in this case it would be even stupider.

Ah well. I just came from a company-wide meeting where a send-off presentation for an outgoing VP was done on a TiBook, and it would appear that it was done on another copy of Keynote that has been snatched up by someone else in the company. The infiltration continues...


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