On Jul 24, 2005, at 22:21 , Allan Odgaard wrote:
On 24/07/2005, at 22.10, Sune Foldager wrote:
many programs remember their windows settings... every finder window remembers it's settings (though that gets stored in the .DS_store file I suppose). And it should really be centralised I think if the files are to be distributed to people,
But what if you move the files around yourself? What if you want to edit it somewhere else? I don't think doing it centralized is a good idea, but let's see what Allan says about it :-).
It's going to be de-centralized, and it's going to use filesystem metadata. It's just that thre was no way to do that before Tiger, ignoring here deprecated resource forks.
Does that mean it's coming? I tried project thing, but the windows don't seem to keep their individual positions onscreen when I "open in new window". Also, whether I have soft wrap on or off does not get saved either. Now, since Sune Foldager actually asked if this behaviour is desirable, I should perhaps try to motivate it a bit. I have many different applications (obviously), and all apps work a bit different. I don't want to learn a file navigator for each and every application that I use. Instead, I have the Finder which is my universal file handling utility. Now the Finder should focus on handling my files, while different applications focus on using those files. I can appreciate the need for project managment and such things as special power tools and I might even start to use them someday, but for now I like the finder. Thus; I don't care for the project manager at all. Why do I want windows to be in the same state all the time? Well it's like leaving a sheet of paper. I put stuff in different places, and when I return I expect them to be there, call me anal (I hope that means "overly tidy" in English as well) but I get very frustrated when someone opens my closed door, says something and then goes away without closing it (i.e returning it to the state it was before; my prefered state). Now for my closing argument, which will also dismiss tabs (again, I have used them and liked them, and many people seem to love them, I'm just saying I don't use tabs much on os x). Say I have two files, I edit one but want to read stuff from the other, I align them next to each other so I can do this. This is what a big screen is for, and everybody seems to like big screen, or even two screens! Yet, when I close one window or quit TextMate, I won't find my window in the same spot I left it, meannig I might have to realign it again in order to get it where I wanted it. Besides, the F10-expose function does not work with tabs (although I saw some app that actually "split" the tabs up in individual windows during expose, very nice). There is also the visual recognition of a file, I know where I am also because I know where that window is on my screen. Now this may sound rather stupid but it's actually true, my eyes flicker around the screen focusing on the area I know I'm at. For instance, my javascript files are up on the right, my php files more in the center etc ... (speaking about my finder windows here) There is a wonderful article on this over at ars technica at http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/finder.ars
So, bottom line is, I like to navigate my files with the finder, I like to find things they way I left them.
Now I don't want to sound grumpy, I just try to motivate my needs and hope that in the future windows will stay as I left them ... any comments?
Andreas