The AIF, or Application Information File, is a Symbian OS-specific file format. An AIF file contains information about captions, icons, capabilities and MIME priority support used by the application. The MMP editor provides support for the AIF editor in the Sources > Resources group.
NOTE AIF files are used only for Symbian OS versions before 9.1.
The kind of information an AIF file can contain are:
Icons: Icons are used to represent applications and their associated document files in the system shell or application launcher. If the phone's UI supports embedding, icons may also be used to represent embedded documents.
The source files for icons are .bmp bitmaps. These source files are built into a single .mbm file (Symbian OS multiple bitmap file) which is incorporated into the aif file as part of the build process.
Captions: A caption is the text displayed beside its icon. Typically it is the application's name.
Captions for multiple languages can be defined in a single aif, and the one corresponding to the current system language will be used. In some UIs, captions may be defined in a caption file, separate from the aif file.
MIME Support: Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, MIMEs, define a file format for transferring non-ASCII data, such as graphics, audio and fax, over the Internet. The AIF file lists the MIME types that the application supports, and the priority of support that each type is given. When a file is opened, Symbian OS launches the application which has the highest priority of support for the type of data in the file.
Given two applications with the same MIME type priority, Symbian OS arbitrarily launches one of them.