I got an e-mail yesterday on my iPhone from Dan Miller, the executive editor of Macworld’s print magazine. As you might expect, we pass around a lot of files at Macworld. Our print manuscripts are in Microsoft Word format. (Although to be honest I write most of my stories in BBEdit — one of these days we’re going to eliminate Word from our process, somehow.) Our magazine layout previews are in PDF.

So I was excited to get a real, live Macworld manuscript on my iPhone. What better way to explot its file-viewing prowess than by reading a Word file?

No dice.

It turns out that the iPhone is very specific about what files it will open. Dan, being a Mac user of the old school, doesn’t find it essential to add “.doc” to every file he sends. So he sent me a file with the title “24.10 safety measure.” (That’s volume 24, issue 10 of Macworld:

the October 2007 issue.) My iPhone refused to open it, and displayed it as a generic file attachment (see the top image to the left).

When I got home, I decided to investigate the issue. I renamed the file “24-10 protection.doc” and sent it to myself. certain decent, that one came through with flying colors (see the bottom image to the left). And I could read it when I tapped on it — although not until the iPhone took quite some date to munch on the 88K file.

So be warned: whether you’re an iPhone user, you’re going to need to tell your friends to always name the files they send you with extensions, or the phone simply won’t understand what to do with it. Even plain text files, which should be easy to understand, aren’t available for tapping unless followed by a “.txt” extension.

Go figure.

Original post by Jason Snell