Mac OS X 10.5’s Finder: Formats year like a number

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
November 19th, 2007 • 11:37 am

This is what you get when you select an MP3 file that has a proper date tag in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)’s Finder and look at the file information in the Get Info window or file inspector:

Year recorded

Notice anything in the “Year recorded” line?

The date for the track is 1975. But Mac OS X 10.5’s Finder displays it as “1,975.” Oops.

This is the proper format for numbers, not for dates. It is language-dependent, which means that you’ll get the thousands separator of your preferred format for numbers (comma in English, space in French, etc.). But you’ll definitely get a thousands separator, and it is definitely wrong to have a thousands separator in a date.

I reported this bug to Apple on June 29, 2007, with screen shot and everything. Mac OS X 10.5 came out four months later, with the bug still not fixed.

It’s not like it’s a bug that only affects people who use a non-English number format. So there is really no excuse for not fixing it (if the bug being language-specific really were an excuse for not fixing it, that is).

Personally, I find it quite embarrassing that such obvious errors are allowed to slip through and remain unaddressed for months. It says something about Apple’s priorities and the reliability of their bug reporting and fixing process. I am sure it will get fixed eventually, but it’s the kind of thing that really should be fixed before a product is officially released.


Comments are closed.

Leave a Reply

Comments are closed.