g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
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Cartago Delenda Est

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Sunday, October 2, 2005
19:18 - Right hand, meet left hand
http://www.drunkenblog.com/drunkenblog-archives/000682.html

(top) link
Evariste pointed me to this unpleasant little discovery within the development culture underpinning Mac OS X.

You know that fancy-pants "unique file IDs" thing that the Mac OS has had since the beginning? How you could move a file anywhere on the disk you wanted to, even while it was being downloaded or copied, and the system would always know where to find it? How no matter where you moved a target file, an alias that had been made to that file would always point accurately to it? How in iTunes, you could move song files anywhere the hell in the filesystem you wanted to, and the database would always be able to play the song?

Well, check this out. "OMFG" is right:

Anyway, I recently filed a bug [radar - #4273090] with Apple about how Preview breaks its bookmarks to files when their file path changes because it doesn't refer to the file via its file system node, and they replied. Quelle surprise! Unfortunately, the reply was less than encouraging.

To quote:

"NAME REMOVED: Engineering has determined this issue behaves as intended based on the following information:

"If you move the file, how would Preview know where you’d moved it? This kind of thing only works with applications because of the launch services mechanism and the Finder. Since Preview isn’t running all the time, it can’t receive notifications of when every file on your disk is moved, and you probably wouldn’t want Preview being launched every time you move or rename a file."


Oh my f*cking god.

Will R.

Who do they have running the show these days? I've been able to convince myself that filename extensions are a necessary evil and the ability to hide them is on balance an elegant compromise that had to have been arrived upon by a savvy and clever engineer. But this? Is Apple being run by people who aren't even familiar with what makes a Mac a Mac?

The comments are quite enlightening:

even apple doesn't know about inodes? sh*t man, we're f*cked.

---

Carl, we're all in this hand basket together. Might as well enjoy the ride.

---

Maybe Apple, in rapidly expanding it's R&D with their increased revenue, is taking in a lot of non-Mac engineers, who aren't yet "indoctrinated" with Macintosh culture.

The words read as if written by a just-out-of-college software engineer who grew up on WINDOWS.

---

I ran into that too, and being a Windows person didn't think it a was bug...

It's that last one that really starts making keyboard-shaped imprints start appearing on my forehead. The Mac-heads reading this article are all reacting in abject horror... and those people who are used to Windows don't realize that there's any problem.

That's what makes me so sick to my stomach to see such features get papered over and minimized and dismissed as wishful thinking: they've been the basis for infrastructural software for twenty years now. They're what has made the Mac so obstinately different. The zealots reacting with revulsion to this Apple engineer's clueless comments are people who have seen the nice little touches like this, hidden throughout the system like Easter jellybeans, that make the Mac a joy to use and to program for. They're the gin in your martini, the clams in your linguini—they're the trimmings of elegance that make the Mac OS more than just Windows with a different skin on it. Take them out and the system will work—it just won't inspire people. They're essential to the Mac mystique; they're what constantly bring new people into the fold. Yet they're so easily overlooked, and so easily lived without, that nobody can even draw frantic attention to them without looking like obsessed kooks.

But at least obsessed kooks have been known to follow up on their horrified discoveries, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if whoever closed out this bug finds himself the pilloried subject of Internet petitions, multi-page John Siracusa rants on Ars Technica, John Gruber diatribes, AtAT mockery, and an ADC bug-filing campaign that'll either end in the company releasing a placating message of renewed commitment to things like unique file IDs, or the closing down of the publicly available bug-reporting system in a hermit-crab-like effort to save face by hiding it.

But this is Apple. I don't expect the latter.


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© Brian Tiemann