Has anyone who uses computers with Adobe Products recently had issues with file extensions interfering with the download of MIT AI files? As an educator, when I try to share files with students or a student were to download a file from a computer, it only recognizes the file as an Adobe Illustrator Action file which has the same .AIA file type. I can't find a work around because, I teach mutlimedia which uses Adobe stuff and I also can not tell the file to open with MIT AI because it is not an application on the computer (Since ti si a web app).
See below post
Thanks for your response but our machiens are NOT generating a zip file. When downloading a file from MIT App Inventor because the file is a .AIA file, the computer is only recognizing that extension as an Adobe Illustrator Action FIle. Only one file NOT zipped or compressed. When trying to upload to MIT App Inventor again the file does not upload. And while the error does not match we know it is because it is tagged as a Illustrator (.AIA) file. This happens regardless of the type of computer we are using. It is not a browser issue at all and have used mac and windows withthe same results.
The problem seems to be that Adobe's Action File configuration is assuming all files suffixed with aia are one of theirs. Adobe should have some way of managing the Action Files. You might turn off that capability on a device that has Adobe loaded and see if you get a different result.
You might be able to control it as shown here https://community.adobe.com/t5/illustrator/how-to-import-the-aia-file-to-illustrator-actions/m-p/10077275 . This means you would have to disable the ability of Adobe to immediately use aia files.
Can you check the default file handlers from settings?
If it has been set to Adobe for AIA files then all downloaded AIA files will behave like that.
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As per Sunny's suggestion
https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000572.htm You might want to disassociate aia from Adobe permanently or from time to time.
Hello Lisa.
We would like to see the exact error message that is displayed.
It should not matter that Adobe files and App Inventor files are on the same machine - the files are 'dumb'. So long as the User actually selects an App Inventor AIA file, App Inventor should load it, no matter that the computer may have given it an Adobe icon.
If there are Adobe files and App Inventor files for the same App Inventor Project, store them in separate sub folders.
Thanks for all the tips. I poked around in illustrator, turned off actions then I believe I unistalled them as well. I then tested by exporting a App Inventor file to my computer. It once again saved it as an Adobe Action file, however, when I uploaded it loaded back to App Inventor just fine. So while I'd liek to think that it was me turning off stuff in AI, I must agree with Chris in thinking about it more, the file itself did not change, just the icon.
Now I wonder what the real issue was when at school and will wait to see if moving forward we have the problem again when back at school.
The opriginal error message students were getting was that "the project name must start with a letter and can only contain letters, numbers, and underscores." This was not the case though as the file WAS named properly. I ultimately used a tablet instead of the computer to download and then posted the .aia file for them which worked for them..but that may have just been whatever the problem was in the first place resolving itself.
Hi Lisa
UTF-8 has several characters representing what the human eye would say is the same symbol, so there could be an unsupported character in a file name, typically when someone exports an AIA from App Inventor and then modifies the name on their computer.
It means AIA name contains -
For example, test_1.aia is fine but not test-1.aia