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Case Study 2 - Mac OS 9

Part of the file system viewers case study.


I do not know whether to attribute the incorrect size of the subfolder below to amnesia or poor arithmetic:

Now it’s gone the other way:

The following folder defaulted to a view of merely the Name and Comments columns. From View → View Options I added a third, Size column:

All very well, but see what happens if I then put that column on the right.

I think it is actually impossible to get any sense out of the column after that. You can see that resizing the window and the column lead to various mangled content, as does zooming the window, where it decides that I want to see all the sizes in bytes. I am guessing that this is a bad interaction with Thomas Tempelmann’s Joliet File System extension that lets Mac OS 9 read Joliet media, placing the full filenames into the comments column.

Every now and then the Finder runs out of memory, and either stops drawing in any of its windows, or fails to acknowledge that they exist. In the first picture, ShadowIRC is frontmost but the Mac has not told it to redraw its windows properly:

Click on the image for the full picture, as you can see that a second ShadowIRC window has ended up visibly behind the Finder.

If you then return to the Finder, the window manager clears the screen where the Finder windows are supposed to be, but then nothing appears: