Mac version file types issue

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1

I found myself in possession of a .fbx file and noticed that it had a Shapr3D icon in the Finder:

IMG_6326
IMG_63261374×880 71 KB

Double-clicking the file opened Shapr and presented this error:

IMG_9336
IMG_9336558×532 30.8 KB

Please don’t register file types that you cannot read! :sweat_smile:

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2

Hi!

The reason for it that it’s good feedback about which file types our users would like to use most, so we can prioritise our efforts to these. E.g. if many users would like to open .fbx, it would move higher on our list of supported formats planned for the future. It might cause some inconvenience sometimes, sorry for that!

3

Well, ok, I appreciate your candor, but this is a really bad idea. You’re abusing a feature of my operating system in order to gather analytics. I can’t speak for other platforms but on macOS this kind of thing is considered extremely distasteful.

It’s also bad analytics. You aren’t finding out how many people want to open .fbx files in Shapr. You’re finding out how many people double-click .fbx files expecting them to open in the proper app and getting Shapr with an error message instead. (Possibly leading them to uninstall Shapr to fix it if they don’t know another way.) Arguably, since you’re gathering data on what I do in the Finder and not inside your app — which I might not even have meant to open — this is spyware and likely illegal in some jurisdictions.

At the very least, it’s not a move that engenders trust. I don’t like using software that I can’t trust. Please reconsider.

4

This is a behavior that made a lot of sense on iOS and we just mindlessly reimplemented it on macOS. We will fix it.

Definitely not illegal though under any jurisdiction, we are fully GDPR compliant, as we are a European company. You can completely opt out from our usage analytics. Also, this is not happing in Finder, but in the app. It’s technically not possible for us to track what you do in Finder. And we don’t even want to.

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5

By “happening in the Finder” I mean this scenario:

  1. Shapr3D is not running
  2. User double-clicks .foo file in Finder, expecting it to open in Foo.app
  3. Shapr3D launches instead and phones home about an activity that had nothing to do with it

But the point is moot since you’re fixing it. That’s great to hear, thanks!

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