The Tracker - Open With

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Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME): The standard format, developed and adopted by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), for including non-text information in Internet mail, thus supporting the transmission of mixed-media messages across TCP/IP networks. In addition to covering binary, audio, and video data, MIME is the standard for transmitting foreign language text which can not be represented in ASCII code.

The Tracker - Open With

When you double- click a file in the Tracker, it will launch the file's preferred application that displays the file's contents. This works fine for most day-to-day work, but sometimes it is not what you want. However, there are times when you may want to use some other application to open the file. For instance, if you have downloaded an image with Firefox, it will by default open in ShowImage. If you rather want to edit the image with an other application like Refraction, you would normally need to go to several steps before having opened it in your wanted application. Zeta keeps track of all applications capable of handling the file type. These applications are called candidate applications. To get a list of all candidate applications for a file type, select one, right-click it with the mouse and choose the Open With command in the File menu. An Open With window is displayed that shows all the applications the system thinks it can use to open the file.

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The applications are divided into four "relations," by their aptness for opening the file:

- The first relation always contains the preferred application (only). This is the application that's used by default to open the file.
- The second relation shows all applications that handle the file's specific type. These "alternate" applications are every bit as appropriate as the preferred application.
- The third relation shows applications that know how to handle the file's generic type. Examples would be video applications that open any MPEG file, or applications that open any type of text file, whether the text is in a word processing file or source code file.
- In the fourth relation are wildcard applications that will try to open any file.

These selections are done according to MIME. Applications that can handle the file's full type (e.g text/plain), applications that can handle the file's supertype (text/...) and last applications that can handle any file type (.../...). You can read more about how Zeta uses MIME in Registrar.

If you select an application other than the preferred one, the Open and Make Preferred button becomes live. This button makes the application you choose the preferred application to open this file and all other files of the same type. Selecting an application in the list and choosing Open uses the chosen application without changing the identity of the preferred application.

If the system can't identify the type of file you're trying to open, the Open With window will list all applications, and list as them as "Does not handle file." If you choose one of these apps, an overly cautious dialog warns you that the application you've selected to open your file doesn't support the file.

You can also get to the Open With list by popping open a file's context menu. The four relations are divided graphically:

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