Case Study 2 - Mac OS 9 page 3
Part of the file system viewers case study.
The Macintosh Finder is renowned for its ability and willingness to remember where you left every icon and every window – the so-called spatial behaviour. It also remembers scroll bar position when you re-open a window, but to the point of stupidity:
No-one thought to check whether the folder in question still possesses enough files to scroll down that far! Sometimes, the scroll bar position is just plain wrong:
There’s also a bug where, sometimes, the scrollbar no longer redraws. It works, but the thumb does not visibly move. I don’t know whether this accounted for the above instance, though.
The Mac “invented” the idea of the Trash, but got eventually owned by Windows’s superior implementation (individual item deletion, permissibility of duplicate filenames, and sort by deletion date). Like the desktop, the Mac Trash was the union of the Trash folder of every mounted volume. Trash items are not normally permitted duplicate names, but they are if they’re on different volumes:
From the old MicroKernel site, evidence that when Microsoft bought a stake of Apple, they persuaded Apple to implement Microsoft minutes:
Also, how can you rebuild the desktop database of a read-only medium?
