Tewha » Finder

Delete drive

Steven Fisher — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 17:06:15 +0000

Thoroughly disguisted by the clutter on my desktop, I decided to delete all of it. I selected everything, deselected a few things I wanted to keep, and hit command-delete (the keyboard shortcut for Move to Trash).

Yes, WxFPP_EN is indeed my Windows XP CD, left over from a failed/aborted attempt at installing Boot Camp. And Mac OS X really is asking me if I want to delete it immediately. Clicking Delete caused this error to appear:

Error -61 looks familiar, so I looked it up: wrPermErr. Yes, that’s right: the Leopard Finder is actually trying to delete files off the CD.

Okay. Bad enough. But at least it didn’t crash, right? I click OK:

After all of that my desktop is still a cluttered mess.

Apple, if Finder stability is one of your goals ur doing it wrong. Hitting command-delete on a volume shouldn’t actually try to delete the files form it. This is laughably bad.

Leopard’s date column

Steven Fisher — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 13:25:36 +0000

The Finder is generally pretty good at reformatting the data column to show dates without truncation. Give it enough space, and it will display the date as “Friday, November 23, 2007, 12:52 PM.” A little less and it is supposed to drop the Friday part. A little less and it switches to a numeric format.

Unfortunately, it seems less than perfect. Sometimes it keeps the long format with columns that are too narrow, as seen in the following picture:

Why? I don’t know. It seems they put so much effort into this already, it’s hard to imagine why they didn’t make the final push to make date columns always usable.

Radar #5612934.

Update what?

Steven Fisher — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 21:13:42 +0000

It may seem like I usually come down hard on Microsoft software. The simple reason for that is that Microsoft software is worse than Apple software. But that doesn’t mean Apple software is flawless.

After the user double clicks a file with no extension (or any other kind of type data), Mac OS X offers a chance for the user to pick an application to use to open the file. So far so good. After clicking the application, I got this message.

If you can figure out what’s being updated, or why Cancel is different than Don’t Update, you are either the developer who wrote this useless message or have the same kind of brain damage. Either way, it’s not too late for you — seek professional help.