AppleWorks Updater

You can use StuffIt Expander to open the .bin file. After you've opened the .bin file, a file ending in .smi will appear; the Finder will open this file when you double-click it.

(9231)

Hello

From time to time, I receive .bin files whose extension is wrong.
Then, I am forced to replace it by .hqx

I never understood who is the culprit but something failed somewhere.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE 21 octobre 2005 7:28:52)

Hi Albert and welcome to the Apple Discussions.

In case you were wondering, you haven't downloaded the file incorrectly and there isn't anything wrong with your Mac OS X.

The problem is Apple. They provide the Updater in a .bin format, and they didn't bundle Stuffit Expander with Mac OS X 10.4 so it could open these files.

I can understand why Apple don't want to include a third-party product with their operating system, but they should have made this Updater available in another format eg .dmg, etc.

NB I've just sent Apple Support some feedback asking they fix this problem.

Cheers.

Dale

Hi Dale

Are you sure that a Stuffit expander app is required ?

For see, I just downloaded the english UK updater.

I got "Z-AppleWorksUpdater.smi.bin".

I replaced .bin by .hqx as already explained (message #1.1) and it expands as: Z-AppleWorksUpdater.smi which is a Stuffit self-expandable (don't requires an expander app).
So I got the AppleWorks 6.2.9 Updater disk image.

From my point of view, the question is: why is Apple sending .bin suffixed files when they are .hqx ones;

I met the same kind of problem with the Internet templates.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE 21 octobre 2005 16:47:23)

Oops

I was called on the phone and it's now too late to edit my late message.

The similar problem with the Internet templates was described in:

KOENIG Yvan, "web tab starting point-newsletter" #5, 01:25pm Sep 27, 2005 CDT

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE 21 octobre 2005 17:37:51)

A .bin file is a MacBinary encoded file. That is, a file where the Mac resource fork and data fork has been combined into one file so they can be sent over the Internet. If the file wasn't encoded this way then the resouce fork would be stripped.

<http://www.stuffit.com/compression/compression.html>

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=05066>

Yvan wrote:

Are you sure that a Stuffit expander app is required ?

Yep. See 'Problems with Tiger' at the following link.

<http://www.macsimumnews.com/index.php/archive/4615/>

And the comment from Scott Rose (incl. an email from Allume, the makers of Stuffit) on this web page:

<http://www.macintouch.com/tiger09.html>

Yvan wrote:

I got "Z-AppleWorksUpdater.smi.bin". I replaced .bin by .hqx as already explained (message #1.1) and it expands as: Z-AppleWorksUpdater.smi which is a Stuffit self-expandable (don't requires an expander app). From my point of view, the question is: why is Apple sending .bin suffixed files when they are .hqx ones

I don't think they are .hqx file. I think it's just a case of Stuffit being clever enough to check the file and finding it's really a MacBinary format, and unencoding it to a .smi.

Also, I thought a .smi file was a self mounting image file format invented by Apple for use on Macs till Mac OS 9. And that the new .smi was .dmg.

<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=30367>

Hello Dale

The first time I read about ".hqx" it was in a message I received from Apple after sending them a sample file which which didn't open.

They said:
"Also, please note that the original file is simply MacBinary encoded. If you add .hqx as the file extension, then you can…"

And it worked as it does with the updater whose name ends with .bin

About the .smi file, you are perfectly right. It is not a Stuffit format.
BUT, as it is a self expanding one, the final result is the same: the updater expands well.

These late weeks, I also got files with the .bin suffix which where in fact .dmg ones.

I discovered the truth looking in the file internals with Hexedit.
I also received AppleWorks files in this state.

These oddities, at least on my machine, are not linked to Tiger as I am working under 10.3.9.

I am quite sure that something is a wrongdoer in the servers but I am unable to discover what.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE 22 octobre 2005 9:50:59)