Ah - but it would add complexity to the user interface. One more choice for the user to make. One more button or menu item to look at and decide whether to use or not. Or one more configuration option.

Even providing this as a configuration option comes at some cost in complexity. This cost may not be worth it. We're talking greatest good for the greatest number here. If it makes 4% of the users 20% more productive, but the added complexity makes the remaining 96% of the users 1% less productive, it is a net loss.

Note: I'm a Mac & Unix expert and I don't want any added complexity. I'd rather have one way of doing things than two ways. Less is more. Speed of operation is far less important than avoidance of error.
The same is true when driving an unfamiliar route through the city. If I know the route from A to B and I know the route from B to C, then I might well choose to drive A -> B -> C even if B is a little out of the way. That avoids any possibility of error. Error can introduce catastrophic delays.

OK, how about a slightly different direction. If Apple were to release an "enhancement pack" (bundled as a separate CD, or as an online list of links or bundled downloads, or whatever) of their own extra and third-party apps targeted at application developers, web developers, and system admins, what would you like to see on it? Obviously this would be excluding anything already on the Xcode/Developer Tools CD, because probably everyone in the target audience already has that.

I would include: A Better Finder Rename, RCDefaultApp, SharePoints, CronniX, PsyncX, BatChmod, Carbon Copy Cloner, GPG, iTattle, Open Terminal Here, YourSQL, HenWen, MailTicker, Postfix Enabler, GraphicConverter, OSXvnc, VNC Thing, BBEdit, LaunchBar, TechTool Pro, Transmit, VolumeWorks, and the unix/web software Apache 2, PHP 5, MySQL 4, Webmin, PhyMyAdmin, Fink.

The shareware/commercial products could be trial licenses.

Or as a Plan B: since by the time those things are gathered, pressed to CD, boxed, and delivered into our hot little hands, they are pretty much all going to be out of date versions, Apple could make a spot on their website that points to a wide variety of 3rd party programs, both commercial and shareware.

Heck, they could probably even organize the links by category and put a 'Mac OS X Software...' item in the Apple menu if they wanted to. :p

Zing! Nice one C.R.A.!

Well, I'm a little concerned that in their haste to make additions to what's available, that people tend to ignore what's already there. Or that it's no good if it doesn't come in the box from Apple.

If the intent of the thread was about how to tailor the thread to 'power users', part of the definition of power user is to first understand what the system offers before mucking around with changing it.

Just my opinion, but then I see a lot of forum threads and deal with a lot of people's systems where problems could have been avoided if a 'think first, tinker second' approach were adopted.

Go visit their website again, you'll find that it contains lots of generally useless software that a person has to sort through to find the good stuff. I think my plan A is vastly superior.

To each their own, I guess. I prefer to find my own good stuff. ;)

What you're talking about doing with the trash sounds like a practice among many computer users called "archiving"-when you want to get rid of stuff taking up space on your hard drive, but you don't want to just delete it immediately.

There are many options for getting stuff off your drive that you don't want to just delete. You can burn it to a writable CD or DVD, you can FTP it to online storage (like an iDisk). You can even write it to tape, if you can afford the hardware.

Most people who put stuff in the trash do it because they are totally through with it and they want it gone. They may forget to empty the trash, but once they've put stuff there they tend to forget about it, 'cause it's history as far as they're concerned.

Since it keeps coming up, I'll explain my practice a little more. I do make permanent backups of things I really want to keep. My design work creates about 500 MB or more of files per month. In one case a particular Photoshop file was 7 gigabytes by itself. So I do a lot of backups, mostly to DVDs these days.

Then I have things I think I may need for a while, but not permanently. I end up reusing a lot of content, and loading it back from DVD or CD is way too slow and inconvenient. Unfortunately I never know which things I will be reusing. So I put files in a folder I call my "180-day bin". As you might guess from the name, that means I keep everything that goes in there for about six months. Each month I clear out things older than six months.

I also have a second internal hard drive, which I backup all my user and data files to on a weekly basis (including the 180-day bin), and also manually each month.

Then there is the trash. I rarely need to recover anything from the trash, because I'm a packrat with data and am quite cautious about what I delete. But on the other hand, there have been times when I've deleted something, and then later wished I hadn't. Fortunately in all or nearly all cases the item was still in the trash waiting for me. If I have system problems, I often empty the trash as a precaution. But otherwise I refrain from emptying it except once a month, and only then after scanning through it to make sure there's nothing I really need. (The scanning is often like what people do with their EULA agreements. I don't read every line, but going through it makes me feel better.)

The 180-day bin takes care of most of my needs now for reusing discarded content, but occasionally the trash has proved useful as a last-ditch measure to save time and effort redoing a bit of work.

So how about getting an external hard drive (Firewire of course for best speed) and relocating your 180-day bin there? Make it the biggest size you can afford, like a 120GB or more. That way, stuff in your 180-day bin can stay there a lot longer than 180 days without taking up space on your main or backup drives. And since it'll be an external hard drive, it will be just about as fast and convenient as your internal hard drives. You can even use it as a backup drive.

Thanks for the suggestion. I have a backup drive already, but a third HD for storing old projects might not be a bad idea.

The difficulty with relying on the "180-day bin" (or something larger) to completely obliviate the need for a managed trash, is that there are many files that have no long-term significance, but might be used once or twice over a couple weeks (although there is no way to know in advance just how long they will be used, or how many times, or even if they will be used again at all). These could be stored in the "180-day bin," but moving everything to the "180-day bin" is not only tedious, but eventually it would fill with files that would make searching much longer. I'm talking about files which might take two minutes to recreate from scratch, but only seconds to drag from the trash if needed again after having been deleted. Eventually the bin would become so big that the time spent searching for the files would exceed the time saved by keeping them around.

So basically my collections of past files break down like this:

• Trash: temporary project files or graphics with possible short-term value, but which would not be a major loss if prematurely emptied
• 180-day: all projects and temporary files that required significant work, up to six months old
• DVD: all projects

This arrangement works well for me, although finer control of the trash mechanism would improve the experience for me. In the latest version of Macworld I saw a writeup for a shareware program called Compost, which may perform the function I need. I haven't tried it yet though. But at least that must mean I'm not the only person looking for something like this!

I 2nd that motion for selective Trash, but no uninstallers, please.
 

I can elaborate about the Trash. One of the things I appreciate about the Windows Recycle Bin is that I can delete one thing out of the Bin, without having to empty the trash. That means I can zap the 3 GB video capture file I no longer need, without also deleting the trashed QuickTimes and HTML files I've put there, which I *might* need later, on short notice, to undo recent changes I'm working on -- that's why they are in the Trash, but the Trash hasn't been emptied.

I'd prefer to just be able to control-click on selected items in the Trash, and delete them, without having to empty the whole Trash contents. That would make everybody happy, wouldn't it? You wouldn't have to change the way you do things, but I'd have a happy little choice that suited me.

I also would like to see many of the options listed here, but not the "unified uninstaller". One of the things I LOVE about well-designed Mac apps is that they need no uninstaller. I don't want uninstallers at all. I want apps that can simply be deleted, and when deleted, take their files with them. One thing I HATE about Windows is that apps alter so many files in the OS and throughout the computer that I must have an uninstaller to clean up all the changes each app has made. Uninstallers work some of the time, but not all of the time, and that's one completely crappy thing about Windows that really, really irritates me -- and costs me time and effort.

Open/Save dialogs would be best for me if they were just like Finder windows. Anything I can do in a Finder window, I want to be able to do in the Open/Save dialogs.

We've had this discussion already I think. Putting something in the Trash that you "*might* want need later" is a perversion of the Trash. You should only put things in the Trash that you *definitely* don't need anymore. If you want a temporary holding bin, just make one (create a folder & name it what you want).

You can do this currently - all you need to do is install a contextual menu item that will delete a file immediately (without putting it in the Trash). Then you can use that on any file, in or out of the Trash. See for example, the "On My Command" CMM.

I agree that it would be great if every app could be installed by simple drag and drop, and removed by throwing the one file or folder in the trash. Unfortunately the library and system extension architecture created by Apple does not always lend itself to that ideal.

I agree that there are many problems with the way Windows handles installs and uninstalls. Unfortunately there are lots of programs of such complexity that a single bundle/folder/package is not adequate. Any of the "big" apps like the Adobe Creative Suite, Macromedia Studio, and even Apple's pro apps tend to install lots of files in lots of places, and from what I gather they couldn't realistically do otherwise.

If all these programs came with their own Uninstall apps, that would be a step in the right direction. Actually that would probably be the best solution, except for the unfortunate cases where two programs by separate companies use the same library files -- and yes, that does happen, even without DLLs. If companies can be weaned away from all dependency on shared libraries (by whatever name), it would definitely improve the install/uninstall experience.

In the current state of affairs, Windows and Mac programs are very much alike, in that some apps on both platforms require no installer (although sometimes that's a bit deceiving -- sometimes the apps install things silently on their first run -- even on the Mac), and for other apps an installer/uninstaller makes a lot of sense.

I want command-period back!

When I get a spinning beach ball of death, I want to be able to hit a single keystroke and have whatever app I'm using abandon whatever it is doing, instantly.

This keystroke is the one thing I really miss from pre-OS X days.

Regarding improved Save As dialog boxes, do you know you can click on filename to replace it. You can also hit command-n to make a new folder, even if there is no 'new folder' button, or its an 'Open' dialog. Finally, you can drag and drop a folder or file from the Finder onto the 'Save As' dialog to easily preselect it.

In those "good old days" (pre-OS X), we had cooperative multi-tasking. What that meant was that it was up to the programmer of each application to release control of the CPU at regular intervals so that other apps could get some CPU time. If an application didn't release control of the CPU, then the whole system was gone. The "Command-period" keystroke was something that needed to be implemented by each application. If an application didn't implement it, that keystroke would do nothing.

In OS X, the system (the WindowServer to be precise) detects when an application has ceased responding to events (i.e. when it has gone off into the weeds due to a bug, or due to some operation that is taking longer than expected) and the system puts up the rainbow cursor to tell you that this application is not behaving as it should. There is no way that the system can tell the application to stop what it is doing and go back to the state it was before - because only the application knows what that state was. The best the system can do is terminate the application. And you do have a keystroke to do that (Command-Option-Escape).

In other words, when you see the rainbow cursor, it means the application is in a state where, if this were an OS 9 application, it wouldn't be responding to the Command-period keystroke - because it is busy doing something else and not paying the least attention to user input of any kind.

I might rephrase your wish to be a wish that OS X applications would be better written so that the user-interface remained responsive at all times, that the developers would be more aware of the possibility of something that is normally a split-second operation taking several seconds (or minutes) if the network isn't responding, etc. I think we can all agree with that. But such careful programming is difficult and time consuming. Hence most applications handle the top 90% of problems and hope for the best with the rest.

As a possible solution...

set Folder Actions (or cron...) to delete stuff in your 180 day folder that's older than 180 days, and also set other scripts on a folder to replace your current trash (maybe with a limit so when you add files and it grows over a certain size, it deletes the oldest files till there is room)

just suggestions

jake

Wow, hayne, if this were a Slashdot forum, I'd want to mod your post +5 for being informative and insightful. Almost all my experience with Macs has been post OSX. Thanks for that background. Good points, too.

I was going to mention the Command-Option-Esc shortcut. I will merely add that it's good that, although it takes more than just that one keyboard shortcut, it's at least handy that an app can be killed without touching the mouse. After CMD-OPT-Esc, you can use the arrow keys to select an app, then whack the Enter key to kill it. You can also kill the popped-up Force Quit dialog via the keyboard: do CMD-OPT-Esc again, then CMD-W.

@ brontojoris: those are all great points you make about the Open/Save dialog box. It's CMD-SHIFT-N to make a new folder, though. :) Oh, and you can do CMD-D to change the dialog immediately to the Desktop for saving or opening things there. Nice.

Package Management and Trash
 

I think it's actually the goal of Gentoo/MacOS to be used for installing EVERYTHING, not just UNIX-y apps. I look forward to the day when I can install Firefox.app (not just X11, pseudo-debian Firefox), and, better yet, when "emerge -uDav world" updates everything including the OS itself (I realize that's a pipe dream, of course -- but it would still be damn cool).

I know the traditional Mac OS way of installing stuff is drag-and-dropping it into the Applications folder, but I like package management systems because you can just search the package database (e.g., `fink list <foo>`, `emerge search <bar>`) for what you want instead of having to deal with Google and VersionTracker and Apple downloads and whatnot. Plus, you can keep the whole system up-to-date that way, instead of having to check for new versions of each app separately and by hand (and Software Update only works for Apple software).

I bet you could do that with some combination of AppleScript and Folder Actions (or init and bash scripts if you're enough of a UNIX geek :cool: ). Ditto with your 180-day folder, mprewitt, although obi1cannoli beat me to it (now that was insightful!).

Now, there are just two simple things that I really want changed about the Trash:

1. Let me send files to the trash by selecting them and hitting "delete!" It wouldn't clutter any menus, and shouldn't you expect a key marked "delete" to delete stuff anyway?
2. Add a button or [context] menu item to restore items from the trash. If I want something untrashed, I want it to be put back wherever it came from without me having to figure out where that is first.

By the way, mprewitt, is this similar to what you had in mind (Scroll down to the "Trash Directories" heading)? In fact, now that I think about it, it would be good for OS X to support this and some other freedesktop.org standards as well...

Finally, would somebody please tell me where the trash can actually is in the filesystem? I've looked for ~.trash, I've looked in ~/Library/, I've searched the Finder .plist for a path, and I still can't find it. Please tell me it's a real folder...right? :(

Depends on who deletes it and where it is deleted from. There is indeed a ~/.Trash folder where things deleted from your home directory go. As well as a .Trashes folder at the root of each volume with subdirectories bearing the uid of the owner of the deleted item(s). I believe that is where things outside your home directory go.

Incidentally, in the classic MacOS, you could click on an item in the trash and select "Put Away" and it would go to where it originally came from.