I HATE APPLE

I don't get this, make a folder and call it whatever you want.

Here's the first thing I did. I made 2 folders, one called "applications ƒ" and one called "utilities ƒ". Note, these aren't the "official" osx applications folders. You can call these whatever...Programs and Tools or whatever. I gave them cute icons and placed them in the sidebar, the toolbar and at the end of the dock. I filled these folders with aliases of all the programs I ever use or want to use. On the dock, a simply control-click, or right click (I use a kensington trackball) gives me a pop-up menu of EVERYTHING I want. Or I just open a new window and click on the Icons and get the full list, good for adding to, or dragging on. My one MAJOR complaint is unlike with OS9 tab windows, you can't drag onto the folde in the dock to open a document in an application within.

Then on the dock itself, I keep it relatively minimal to the stuff I use all the time, and a few drag-n-drop programs like stuffit. I keep the dock on the left hand side and turned off minimizing and genie effect and all that.

By the way, I had the beige iBook, and shortly after I installed OSX on it, it died.

It is indeed awful, but I think the idea is that you shouldn't have to use it very often. Particularly as XP has given up on the very annoying Win98 modal dialogs that pop up at logon for each unreachable network drive.

On XP, if you type the server's UNC path* into a Windows Explorer window and right-click on a share, "Map network drive..." is one of the menu choices. It brings up the same dialog, but with the path box filled out and uneditable. That's a slightly easier way of doing it.

* ie, the hostname preceded by '\\'

1) Open Regedit
2) Export the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Network branch
3) Send the export file to the other computer
4) Right-click on the export file and select "Merge" to load it into the registry.

That should copy all the drive mappings from one computer to the other. If you just want to copy, say, the Z drive, export HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Network\Z.

some ppl not getting this:
when you double click a folder you're not opening the folder, you're opening a little browser window that shows you what's in the folder

the key difference is that on os9 you would open a new window with the items in there showing. and the KEY thing was that the position of the window, the view into the window, and the items within that window were in EXACTLY the same place as when it was last opened, giving you a visual 1:1 identity between the folder and the view of it.

now in osx you have a ONE WINDOW approach like a web browser that shows you the stuff in any folder. when you open a folder the window shows the contents of a new location.

you can SORT OF "revert to os9" with the toolbar toggle (the long item in the top right) in that it will open new folders in a new window, but the finder broken-ness extends deep enough that you still don't get the persistence of the window loc and icon arrangement/view that you are still looking for.

LEOPARD BETTER FUCKING FIX THE FINDER

I tried this, but then came across another wondrous piece of Apple logic. You can't name them after the file path, it only keeps the final folder name.

I don't get this, make a folder and call it whatever you want.

I might try and reproduce this so I can better explain... just scanning the thread quickly right now, thanks for all the help so far.

xpost -- Britain's Obtusest Shepherd, There's already been an upgrade (Tiger), they had a chance already, what makes you think they consider it important enough?

stet - I don't know why it pisses me off so much. Because it seems impossible to ignore I guess. I still haven't watched those DVD's anyway so I may fire it up tonight and have another look.

brrrrrrrr. it makes me shudder - but that's 'cos i'm a) an old-skooler who cut his teeth on MS-DOS 3.1 and likes to have complete control, and b) an anally retentive pedant who gets upset if one MP3 is in the wrong place.

i don't like the fact that unix has a sprawling great mass of libraries and directories and hidden files and permissions and so on, because it does restrict my ability to organise my files as i might want, but, as i've said elsewhere, i'm happy enough to deal with it if it means the increased power and stability of OS X.

so if, like you say, this is the direction we're moving in - and, you know, you could be right - then i'd embrace it as long as there was a good reason to do so.

The Newton does this best of all, with all the info stored in "soups". All apps can access all soups; when you add a contact in the address book and give a birthday, the contact book automatically puts an entry in for that day, because they use the same "dates" soup. There is no file manager on the newton, and no saving. It's great.

OS X is moving slowly towards this, especially with iLife. The iApps all take care of their own files, so in theory you should never have to go into the folder where your MP3s are, or where your pictures are. For pics, If you want to email them/make a website/edit them in Photoshop/w.e., iPhoto has the skillz built in. They're integrated too, so when you want to add music to slideshows, or pics to movies, you use the media browser.

It's time that sort of thing was a system-wide framework. It's sort of like I was asking Fandango upthread -- what real use is there for the Finder? How much file-shoving do we really need that can't be better done as an integral part of apps?

For very document-based apps, like Word, you could just have open dialogs that were spotlight queries for all items of .doc, and rather than trying to remember where you put something, you remember what it contained. The anal types like GF can express themselves through meticulous tagging, to make their searches even faster.

It's time for files and their organisation to be done by the computer, not by me going click-drag-sigh.

x-post

A file isn't a file, though, Alba. Look at the hassle they're having archiving the BBC Domesday project that was written for BBC Masters and LaserDiscs. Even if they get the files off, it'll be a hell of a job decrypting them. And the really early word processor files from the days of the format wars are really hard to read.

If the "soups" (not that I'm suggesting them for OS X tho) were in XML, they'd be readable virutally forever. Backing up is also something for the computer to worry about. People should never have to worry about that shit. That can just be a search done by the computer itself, late at night: "Transmit [all stuff] changed [today] to [this server]".

Well that's great in theory but what if your hard disk dies or whatever?

Though in time, all yr stuff will be stored online anyway, and probably the only stuff that should be on local file store will be startup and system files.

I don't see that it's in any software engineer or hardware manufacturer's interest to ever develop a universal open standard for information and then retain complete backwards compatibility for it as technology changes, so it's a safe bet we'll never reach that point barring a discovery of an economic model that beats Adam Smith.

I knew someone who experienced the rather nasty filesystem corruption that occurred with Apple-format (HFS+) hard disks on early versions of OS X. When it reached your NetInfo database file - bang, one useless computer.

Do you work for Sun Microsystems? Even they couldn't get that to work, though, so I guess you don't.

Anyway, worst idea ever, gmail's nice but it's not what I would call "mission critical" and definitely the most insecure of all possible solutions to any given problem is to put it "online."

i have two macs and one iDisk. this means i can't use backup.app, because it can't handle the concept of two machines sharing the same backup folder. i therefore have no choice but to do everything by hand. it's time-consuming, but at least i know i'm not overwriting anything important. if something fucks up, it's my fault.

christ: trust my computer to do my backups? no fucking WAY.

You don't need an open standard at all either -- but if it's in your interests to make yr apps work with others, you'll do it. If Apple makes the iLife media browser system-wide, so that you can pop-up a palette in Word and drag one of yr pics into the doc, everyone will be clamouring to integrate it, and also to provide an uplink to it.

Look at how they're all jumping to provide Spotlight searching, even when that means drastically restructuring the app -- Entourage in particular.

xposts: you missed out the "in time" part of the quote, Tombot. It won't happen soon, but as bandwidth only gets faster, I don't see why not. Online not in this case nec. meaning "teh internet" either. Where does my address book live, for instance? It's synced almost invisibly between newton, Mail, phone and Mac.

GF: But you trust Google to back up yr mail?

good point. not really. i keep meaning to download it all one day, just for keeps.

Oh - I guess that answers my question. I'm sure I tried that once too. I think Azureus's interface is fine.

Who had the bright idea of making it download 30 kilobyte plugins using bit torrent? FOR FUCKS SAKE!

xpost,

stet it looks WORSE on OS X