a legitimate complaint (i think)
The switch to OS X has been occasionally bumpy, but overall I'm extremely happy to have made it. Generally whatever problem I've had has turned out to be due to my own ignorance. Whenever I ran into an annoyance, helpful Mac gurus with the gentle eyes of true belief would swoop in, diagnose my problem, and help me get past it. There are still things I don't like — control-clicking, non-standard keyboard shortcuts, Expose's occasional unpredictability — but overall I'm very pleased with it. After yesterday's news, I would unconditionally recommend Apple notebooks to anyone with enough money to buy one.
But last night I finally came across a bug that really does seem serious and inexcusable. Maybe someone will point out what I did wrong. But I have my doubts about this one being my fault.
I was trying to burn a CD. In OS X you do this through a pleasantly-intuitive mechanism called a Burn Folder. You create one and drag files into it. OS X makes shortcuts to the original file in the burn folder rather than copying them in their entirety. When you've got your disc properly laid out, you press a little "Burn" button. It's nice.
Except here's the thing: if you delete a shortcut from the burn folder, it deletes the original file. Perhaps there's a way to suppress this behavior, but I couldn't find it. And it's definitely the default action. This was particularly horrifying to me because I was working off of Charles and my mp3 collection, which currently resides on a removable USB hard drive and nowhere else (I haven't had a chance to move it back to the Linux machine since rebuilding it). It took me a little while to realize what was going on, and when I did, the Undo function would only repair the most recent deletion.
Fortunately the damage wasn't too extensive, and I could rescue everything from the trash can. But did Apple really never consider the idea that someone would want to copy some top-level directory to a burn folder, then prune its subdirectories? A shortcut is a shortcut, guys. Check out "man ln" — it's good stuff! More importantly, have a look at how deleting a shortcut/symlink works in every other situation on every popular OS.
I like you, Apple, but if this is your way of getting me to repurchase all of my music from iTunes I'm going to be pissed.
Comments
Hmm.
I can't actually reproduce this...
I create a burn folder on my desktop, drag the files into it, burn the disc, open the burn folder, delete the shortcut.... the original files still exist?
I've never had any issue with this... has this happened more than once? Or is it possible that you had two seperate Finder windows open and deleted from the wrong one?
Oh, nevermind... I see exactly what you did... and no, I don't believe there's any way around it...
It IS just a shortcut/alias, which is fine for files, but when you double click on an alias for a folder to manage whatever's in it, Finder follows the alias (leaving the Burn Folder) and opens the actual folder, thus helping you delete your actual files!
I can see how that might bum folks out, but it's just meant to be a quick and dirty way to toss some stuff on a disc...
Ahhh... Okay, I think I see. So the folder shortcut I put in the burn folder, when clicked on, didn't take me further into the burn folder, but rather to the original folder. Hmm. Yeah, I don't care for that much -- it'd be better if it built symlinks for all of the files within (although obvs. that'd introduce more overhead). I can understand where they're coming from, but I still think it's a bad design choice.
So yeah, my fault on that one (sort of). I hated Finder at first, but have come to tolerate it a bit more. It's still slower for me to navigate it than MS explorer, however, and the hierarchical file view is more confusing than MS's alternative.
I guess the moral of the story is to create a real disk image in the appropriate utility.
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