Jump to page content

Bug of the moment 2005-11-18


This is a strange bug that I stumbled on accidentally while working with some image files created with Arcsoft Photoimpression for Windows; each image’s sequence number is separated from the date by a caret mark, thus: Nov17^01.png, Nov17^02.png and so on.

Mac OS on the other hand uses ^0 and up as placeholders in dialog box text. So when you get a message involving such a filename, this happens:

Mr Anonymous decided to outdo me, of course:

I am a touch concerned that this bug still exists in Mac OS X! After all, we are talking about perfectly valid filenames here, albeit very unlikely ones. It is also Apple that we are talking about, so I guess I should not be terribly surprised :] Mr Anonymous puts the blame on Photoshop for still being Carbon, but Carbon is an official API and that does not remove the blame from Apple for not having sorted out their text substitution mechanism in ParamText() in the first place.


Posted 18th November 2005 – Comments and questions?