Monthly Archives: April 2005

Braindead Finder Behaviour

Uncategorized,

Because of what I consider totally braindead behivour in the OS X Finder I appear to have lost about 60 pictures from my trip. When I offload pictures from card I generally drag the 100PENTX folder from the card onto my desktop and I leave things in that folder until I have a chance to compress the pictures, divide them into days, and upload them. Well OS X does this crazy thing where when you drag the folder onto the desktop it asks you if you want to replace the folder with the same name. On Windows I always say yes and it just adds the new pictures to those already in the folder. In OS X it apparently means delete the folder that’s already there with no way to recover it and replace it with the one you’re dragging. This happened to me a few times and I couldn’t figure out what was happening, luckily though I had backups on my iPod. Unfortunately going back over the pictures from the trip it seems a day is missing. Fortunately it was a day of mostly travel so I’ll live, but still a bummer. Updates: John Gruber weighs in, and here’s the exact message in Windows.

New update: Robert Scoble put me in touch with Bob Day who had this to say:

If the question is just “Why do merge by default?”, there are lots of
answers.

1. Because it maps well to operations that users are likely trying to
accomplish (see the scenario of dropping a picture folder from a
camera).
2. Folder replace can be done by deleting the destination folder first,
and then copying. If you have replace be the primary method, then merge
becomes a very tedious process.
3. Because it is less destructive?
…

Please realize that having a camera that uniquely assigns picture
numbers until you reset them becomes very important with this merge
behavior. If your pictures are all uniquely named, the default of
replacing files with the same name will allow you to not lose any files.

Also realize that this is a complicated scenario for most users. Almost
any choice is going to be bad for some users.

And yes, the behavior is a concious choice. We had to implement this
feature in Windows 95.

I followed up that “So before that [Windows 95] folders were deleted and
overwritten?” Bob responded: “I need the source code to Windows 3.1 to confirm. Anybody remember “File
Manager”? wow, that is old.” And dug up:

Ok, archeological discovery over. (wipes the dust off his sleeves)

Win3.1 would say the same thing for folders as it did for files:
“Replace file with file ”

And if you said “yes” for a folder, it would try to delete the
folder first, which would error out if the directory
wasn’t empty. Not sure what the error message is there.

I would love to get similar background for the Mac OS X behaviour.

Travel Troubles

Personal

By the way, I’ve never been happier to be home. It’s the little things — like using a mouse and a real keyboard. Unfortunately getting here took the better part of 19 hours. They actually had the hood up on the plane that was supposed to fly me overseas, which was a long delay. I overheard someone say “if they get out the duct tape I’m staying here.” The connecting flight in DC was very missed, but after 45 minutes in line I got the last seat on a direct flight to SFO leaving in about two hours. Then I spent more than two hours in line trying to get a boarding pass and through security, the height being my ticket was once again tagged SSSS which mean I got the “special” treatment at security with my flight set to take off in 8 minutes. (I swear I’m on some sort of list.)

The very worst was I had bought some matchbooks for my sister (who collects them) and they were in my suitcase. The guy asked how many there were and I said “two” because that’s how many I bought at souvenir places. He found another (a free one from a hotel) and another TSA guy came up and said “which two of these do you want?” and took the third one away from me. I was shocked, and said “Are you going to keep that?” and he replied “Well you’re not getting it back.” I stumbled away to the shuttle and ran to the gate, 10 minutes after it was supposed to leave and all the doors were closed but luckily the plane hadn’t left yet. I finally got in around 1 AM and it was too late for BART so I just took a cab. Now I’m home and warm and dry and clean and being back after travelling so intensely makes it seem that much better. Time to disappear under some sheets…

A Summary

Asides

I guess the problem with a long piece is many just skim it, and the more words there are the more chance there is for the meaning to be lost. I’ve given a lot of thought to putting things as succintly as possible: Knowing what I knew then, I would probably make the same decision; knowing what I know now I wouldn’t even consider it. Not thinking through all the ramifications was a big mistake. So was not having more community dialog from the beginning, which would have caught this earlier. I am extremely sorry for both, and it won’t happen again. Thank you to everyone who has been so supportive. Amazingly, WordPress has gotten more donations in the last 4 days then it has in the past year — what an incredible community.