Betalogue

WARNING: The concentration of stupidity in this particular blog item might be hazardous to your UI health.

In the gallery of stupid Finder behaviours, this surely must be in the Top 10 attractions, in no small part due to the ease with which the behaviour can be reproduced. Here you go:

1. Take any Finder item in any Finder window. As an example, let’s say the item is called “item.mp3.”
2. Use the “Duplicate” command (command-D) to create a copy of the item in the same location. The Finder will automatically call it “item Copy.mp3.”
3. Select “item Copy.mp3” and press command-Delete to put it in the Trash.
4. Select the same item.mp3 item again.
5. Use the “Duplicate” command (command-D) once again to create a copy of the item in the same location. Again, the Finder will automatically call it “item Copy.mp3.”
6. Select “item Copy.mp3” and press command-Delete to put it in the Trash.

And here’s what you get from your dear friend Mr. Finder:

I am sorry, but this is just idiotic. I am trashing the item. What do I care whether the Trash already contains an item with the same name? Does my paper basket complain if I throw two copies of the same junk mail in it? (The reason for this is obviously that, to a certain extent, the Trash is just like any other folder in Mac OS X: It cannot contain two items with the exact same name. But it is equally obvious that the user does not care one bit about this particular limitation of the Trash in Mac OS X.)

Note that the alert text is not even good enough to give you a clear idea of what the problem is: Nowhere does it mention that the problem in question is with the contents of the Trash. The name is “already taken,” but the alert doesn’t tell you where and by whom.

And the recommendation (“Please choose a different name”) is equally stupid. Not only is it outrageously absurd to ask the user to rename a file before putting it in the Trash, but it’s not even necessary! Once you click on “OK” in the alert box, you will see that the Finder has indeed moved the file whose name was already taken to the Trash just the same. So what’s the problem?

In fact, if you look inside the Trash, you will see that the Finder has renamed one of the two files with the same name by adding some random numeric suffix to its name. So all is well: The two items are in the Trash, and they don’t have the same name anymore.

In other words, the alert box is not only stupid, it’s useless. It’s not necessary to warn the user about anything, because the Finder takes care of the problem by itself. Which is a good thing considering that the only option the alert gives you is… “OK.”

Like I said, the amount of stupidity that Apple’s engineers have managed to cram into this particular behaviour is just staggering. In my view, the engineers responsible should be forced to type the phrase:

The name “File Name” with extension “.ext” is already taken. Please chose a different name.

a hundred times every morning until the problem is fixed. That is the least I would demand as punishment for this UI crime.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 9:23 am and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.