Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard): Fix for making aliases in list view

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
September 15th, 2009 • 10:49 am

For a company that prides itself on attention to detail, Apple occasionally suffers from disappointing and rather frustrating lapses.

A long standing bug affecting the process of making an alias in list view has finally been fixed in Snow Leopard, but the fix itself introduces yet more unjustified inconsistency.

Prior to Mac OS X 10.6, when you had a Finder window in list view, if you selected an item in the list, then held down the Option and Command keys and attempted to drag-and-drop the item with the mouse pointer—a process which was supposed to enable you to create an alias of the selected item and drop it in the desired location—instead of creating an alias the Finder would switch to some kind of scrolling mode, with a hand cursor indicating that dragging in the window would cause it to scroll.

This did not make any sense, because dragging-and-dropping an item with the Option and Command keys down in column view and icon view would work as expected and create an alias of the selected item.

The only way to get the same expected result in list view was to start dragging the selected item without any modifier keys and then start holding down the Option and Command keys while the dragging was already in progress.

I submitted a bug report about this several years ago, and finally got an e-mail during the testing stages of Snow Leopard indicating that the issue had been addressed in the new system. But has it really been addressed?

Yes and no. Now, indeed, when you are in a Finder window in list view in Snow Leopard’s Finder, if you hold down the Option and Command keys and then start dragging the selected item, the Finder will create an alias.

However, in the process of fixing the situation, Apple’s engineers have managed to introduce a new inconsistency. In both column view and list view, when you try to create an alias by holding down the Option and Command keys and dragging an item that is currently selected, the Finder deselects that item while you are dragging it.

It does not make any sense, and it’s not consistent with what happens in icon view. In icon view, when you select an item, then hold down the Option and Command keys and start dragging the selected item, the selected item in question stays selected at all times.

Why is this important? Because the selection highlighting gives you a better visual indication of what you are currently creating an alias of. Without the selection highlighting, the only visual indication you have of what you are about to create an alias of is the transparent “proxy” of the file you are dragging that Mac OS X draws under the mouse pointer. This proxy is not easy to see and it is therefore easier to make a mistake and end up dragging the wrong item without realizing it. This is especially problematic in list view and column view, where list items are so close to each other that it is easier to accidentally click on the wrong item. Paradoxically, the only view mode where the selection remains highlighted is the icon view mode, where it’s needed the least!

The inconsistencies don’t stop here. What happens if you already have an item selected in a Finder window and then hold down the Option and Command keys and start dragging another item?

Well, in list view and column view, the Finder interprets the action as the combination of the two things: a command-click to add another item to the current selection and the option-command-drag that creates the alias. So you end up with a selection consisting of the combined two items, the Finder creates aliases of the two items—and, unlike what happens when holding down the Option and Command keys and dragging the current selection, the Finder actually keeps the new selection highlighted during the dragging process!

And in icon view, things are yet again different. If you already have an item selected in a Finder window in icon view and then hold down the Option and Command keys and start dragging another item, the Finder deselects the current selection and creates an alias of the other item only.

All this is terribly inconsistent and does not make sense. The behaviour should be exactly the same in all view modes, and the selection should never lose its highlighting during the dragging process.

Given that, after several years, Apple’s engineers finally got around to addressing the problem with making aliases in list view, you’d think they would have paid more attention to the various aspects involved in the creation of aliases in all view modes and made sure that they were all consistent and intuitive.

Unfortunately, they didn’t, and now we’ll probably have to live with these new inconsistencies for many more years. They are not a big deal in the big scheme of things, of course, but that’s not the point. The point is that Apple’s trademark is attention to detail, and yet not all details are treated as equals.


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