I miss the 'put away' command. It was great to be able to drag files from where ever to the desktop, and at the end of the day just hit cmd-y, to clean up the mess.

Umm, maybe I'm misunderstanding what you are asking for, but I think this functionality is already there. But you need to hold down the Command (Apple) key when you press Delete. I use it all the time.

DOH! Stupid case sensitivity...I only looked for (lowercase T) .trash. :o

Well, thanks for telling me about cmd-delete, but it's still not as efficient as just hitting the delete key by itself.

it is very clear to me now (two months with 10.3.7) that the designers
of OS X did not have anyone "on the Linux level" giving relevant user
scenarios for the system. Maybe they didn't have them around
(doubtful) or they didn't want to let people see the guts (shameful).
It's really a shame, because under the hood, it's ALL here, it just
not easy to use if you are trying to do anything except point and
click and get GUIfied. If they would open themselves up to that
command line community, EVERYONE who is running Linux would flock to
Mac. as it stands, I'd have a hard time recommending it to developers
"at the Linux level"

The problem is that the Delete key alone is too efficient. I don't want to aim for F12 and miss it slightly, deleting a file that happened to be selected somewhere else in the window, and maybe not noticing that until it could be too late. Cmd-Delete is really no slower, yet it is far more deliberate, and therefore far safer. Basic human-centered UI design in action. Though ultimately, Apple needs to make these kinds of shortcuts configurable in case you do want to live on the edge. (More than just the ones already configuarble in the Keyboard prefpane.)

I'm not sure what sort of things you are having trouble with. Use of Unix-level commands in Terminal is fully documented and as easy to use as any other Unix I've had experience with.
When people say "at the Linux level" in the context of OS X, it mostly means that they don't really distinguish between "Linux" and "Unix" and the latter comes to their lips more readily because of media exposure. they really mean "at the Unix level".

Perhaps you wish that the Unix that underlies OS X were Linux rather than FreeBSD. That has been the topic of discussion elsewhere and it has been explained that there are good reasons why Apple chose FreeBSD instead of Linux.

Put Away != Delete, right?
 

I didn't use Macs much before OSX, but ... didn't the "Put Away" command return your file[s] to their previous location? That's not the same thing as putting them in the Trash. I seem to recall that "Put Away" remembered where each file came from, when you put it onto the desktop. Triggering "Put Away" would move the file back to the location from which you'd taken it when you put it onto your desktop.

Isn't that right? It's been years, and, like I said, I wasn't really into Macs until OSX came out ....

Software-Update for Third-Party-Apps
 

-->jmd2121

While there may be religious convictions at stake here, in my experience, real hackers (like in technologically clued) and Alpha-Geeks (Tim O'Reilly...) tend to use OS X, various Linux-distros (gentoo, LFS, debian), FreeBSD. And even among those not using Mac OS X, i- and PowerBooks are runners-up to ThinkPads.

You should probably hang out with people who don't need to be told what OS tends to work anyway :; .

The One Truly Useful Thing I miss in OS X is a way for third-party-apps to take advantage of Software-Update.
It would not take a lot of ressource to come up with a working and really useful solution.

@ OSXPounder

Correct, the put away command put files back to where they were. I just meant that the mess on the desktop was cleaned up.

The Put Away command could be used on files in the Trash to put them back where they came from, too. At least it could on System 6 and 7. I didn't use Mac OS 8 and 9 all that much.