It lets you read any file - and copy anything you find, text & pictures! It's perfect for browsing all types of files, including foreign files and files your Mac can't open, and it's indispensable for recovering text from damaged files - a lifesaver!
Ever get a document from a friend or online service, only to find that you don’t have the application necessary to open it? Sure, you can get software that will play movies or open damaged files or open DOS files or ASCII files, but wouldn’t it be nice to have all that in one product?
CanOpener, a 180K utility from Abbott Systems, opens practically everthing; DOS files; sound files (SND, FSSD, Instrument formats); pictures in MacPaint, MacDraw II, PICT, EPS, ICON, and TIFF formats; damaged files; QuickTime movies; and ASCII-based text formats.
Opening CanOpener brings up a simple window divided into three sections: File List, Contents Area, and View Area. The File List shows mounted volumes; a pull-down menu lets you select individual volumes, folders, and files for searching or viewing. The Contents Area lists the text, pictures, or sounds associated with a selected file. Double-click on an item in the Contents Area to display it — or play it — in the View Area. In the case of QuickTime movies, a player with start, stop, volume, and frame-by-frame buttons appears; you then view the movie using CanOpener’s player. CanOpener requires that QuickTime be installed in your system in order to play movies.
Once a file is in the View Area, it’s easy to use the Clipboard to cut and paste the file into a document created in your favorite application. I was able to respond to a coworker’s plea for help — he needed Adobe’s PageMaker to view a file — in literally seconds by opening the PageMaker file with CanOpener, copying and pasting it into Microsoft Word, and sending it to his desk over office E-mail.
I always found CanOpener to be quick with this open-copy-and-paste routine: a PC file that took MacLink Plus/Translators four minutes to convert to Word took CanOpener one. The drawback is that the CanOpener-converted file was text-only, while the MacLink Plus document retained its formatting. The CanOpener version also had a lot of junk text at the end of the file that the MacLink file did not. Tweaking the text-cleanup section in File Preferences helps eliminate random-character noise from a file.
Abbott also promotes CanOpener as a text-and-file-search utility, but I encountered speed problems with this function. Searching text for a phrase in a particular folder was no problem. When I expanded the search to my entire hard drive, I waited and waited. After six minutes of watching the little can go round and round, I canceled the operation. It turns out CanOpener was searching not just my hard drive but all mountable file senders — yikes! I tried it again, with extensions off and no servers mounted; this time CanOpener brought up a dialog box to connect to the sender and wouldn’t let me cancel out. It was either search the server or forget the whole thing.
My other complaints are few. The page-up and page-down keys work in the File List window, but not in the View Area window. Some of the key commands are not what I’d expect of a Mac program — ⌘-P for View Preferences instead of Print, for instance. And ⌘-period (.) doesn’t always stop the current operation.
The Last Word
There are specialized utilities for viewing graphics, movies, or DOS files, and for opening files when the application is unavailable. CanOpener opens them all, and if it doesn’t work quite perfectly, it does work fast. For an all-in-one product with a street price of around $60, it can’t be beat.
Courteau, Suzanne. (May 1995). CanOpener 3.0. Macworld. (pg. 67).
CanOpener 3.x
Abbott Systems
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
6 / 
2014-04-14 / 
2020-04-06 / 
1c87e04d3b0b2dfa6f0df51dd873f40565040744 / 
/ 
canopener_3.5.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
