Re: V4.0 on NT4.0/SP3 does not update the Start/Documents List
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg20106] Re: [mg20074] V4.0 on NT4.0/SP3 does not update the Start/Documents List
- From: John Fultz <jfultz at wolfram.com>
- Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 02:43:15 -0400
- Organization: Wolfram Research, Inc.
- References: <199909290733.DAA11878@smc.vnet.net.>
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Yes, I've seen this and I know what's going on. I also know why a number of people probably don't see this problem. If you're *really* interested in what's going on, you'll have to stick with me through a few details of how Windows works. If not, just skip to the ***. When you right-click on a file which is associated with an application in Windows, you'll note that there are usually at least a couple of things you can do with that file in the right-click menu, such as 'Open' and 'Print'. The options may change depending upon the type of file you've right-clicked on. These options correspond to what are called 'verbs' in Windows (presumably because the word 'verb' implies action, which would be taken on the file). Each verb has an internal name which is *not* the one that shows up on the right-click menu. It's the name that programmers use. In anticipation of people wanting to have several versions of Mathematica (or Mathematica- related products, like Publicon) on their systems, we began implementing these verbs using a numbering scheme. So, the first version of Mathematica installed would take 'verb1' and 'verb2', and the next would take 'verb3' and 'verb4' and so on. What we did not realize, because there isn't much documentation on this, is that Windows treats a verb called 'open' specially. One thing that happens is that, if you double-click or perform a right-click action on a file association with an 'open' verb, it gets added to the Documents menu. For reasons which are not entirely clear to me, if a file association does *not* have an 'open' verb, then the document doesn't get added to the Documents menu. Version 3, incidentally, used the 'open' verb (we hadn't thought as much about versioning at that point). ***So, this worked in version 3. It *also* works if version 3 is simply installed on your machine, even if you're opening the documents in version 4. We're looking into a fix this for future versions. If all you have is version 4, then you can make this work again by doing the following: * Double-click 'My Computer', and choose the View->Options... menu item. * Click on the File Types tab. * Find 'Mathematica 4.0 Notebook' in the list box, click it, and press 'Edit...' * Press 'New...', and type 'open' (without quotes) as the action. * Click the 'Browse...' button and find the Mathematica executable (Mathematica.exe in the installation directory). * Click 'OK', then click 'Close', and click 'Close' again. You should now find Mathematica notebooks being added to the Documents menu when you double-click them. Note that, should you ever want to uninstall Mathematica, you may have to go and delete this by hand. Sincerely, John Fultz jfultz at wolfram.com User Interface Group Wolfram Research, Inc. dkeith at sarif.com wrote: > > Hello, > > Shortly after installing mathematica 4.0 on NT4.0/SP3, I noticed that > Mathematica would not update the NT Start/Documents list with the > recently accessed notebook filename on my system at home. It did work > on my system at work. I believe at various times it has worked and not > worked -- and in fact it no longer works on my system at work. (I > installed and operate with admin privileges and other applications do > this fine.) > > I turned this in at the time to Wolfram tech support and they could not > reproduce the behavior. I inquired about it again a few days ago to see > if they have learned anything further and was told that no one there > has seen this behavior and no other users have reported it. > > Does anybody have any ideas? > > Thanks. > > Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ > Before you buy.
- References:
- V4.0 on NT4.0/SP3 does not update the Start/Documents List
- From: dkeith@sarif.com
- V4.0 on NT4.0/SP3 does not update the Start/Documents List