UI grumble: recent item lists
Oct. 24th, 2007 11:17![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
viktor_haagApple's UI engineers do their jobs so well, usually, that when something feels like an unfinished corner, it tends to irk me more than it should. To wit: it bothers me that OSX's underlying file management frameworks insist that, if an open application has a file in its "recent items" list that this file is "in use" and cannot be trashed. Especially since the "correct" way of working in the OSX world (thank-you Unix-style memory management) is to open applications the first time you use them and leave 'em open forever.
If I want to throw away a file that's been viewed by Preview, QuickTime player, or other application that makes (presumably) proper use of the underlying Apply file management frameworks, why the heck should I have to (a) spend the time to clear out the recently visited list in the application, or (b) quit the application before I can throw away the file.
Any file that's not actively loaded by an application should be a candidate for trashing, and I (naively?) suspect that this is a kludgy decision on the part of the OS team at Apple to "speed up file re-loading time" by maintaining an open descriptor for any file you've opened during the application's current execution time even after you've closed its window. This may make sense with documents a user is liable to want to go back to again and again, but I would have thought that Preview and QuickTime Player (more than most other apps) are supposed to treat documents as disposable: you view your file once, and then you don't care!
Bad Apple engineers! Bad!
Post Scriptum - it occurs to me that by maintaining a recently visited file as "open" and application might also have the advantage of getting notification of events about that file's state. For example, if the file gets moved from one folder to another, the application could get notified of the new location so that it can still be quickly opened by the user from the recently viewed list of the application. But, if this is the case, then I wonder why trashing a file shouldn't also be supported as a file change the application should cope with? (i.e. the application should could remove the file from the list at that point, or more gracefully handle a "file has been deleted" state.)
If I want to throw away a file that's been viewed by Preview, QuickTime player, or other application that makes (presumably) proper use of the underlying Apply file management frameworks, why the heck should I have to (a) spend the time to clear out the recently visited list in the application, or (b) quit the application before I can throw away the file.
Any file that's not actively loaded by an application should be a candidate for trashing, and I (naively?) suspect that this is a kludgy decision on the part of the OS team at Apple to "speed up file re-loading time" by maintaining an open descriptor for any file you've opened during the application's current execution time even after you've closed its window. This may make sense with documents a user is liable to want to go back to again and again, but I would have thought that Preview and QuickTime Player (more than most other apps) are supposed to treat documents as disposable: you view your file once, and then you don't care!
Bad Apple engineers! Bad!
Post Scriptum - it occurs to me that by maintaining a recently visited file as "open" and application might also have the advantage of getting notification of events about that file's state. For example, if the file gets moved from one folder to another, the application could get notified of the new location so that it can still be quickly opened by the user from the recently viewed list of the application. But, if this is the case, then I wonder why trashing a file shouldn't also be supported as a file change the application should cope with? (i.e. the application should could remove the file from the list at that point, or more gracefully handle a "file has been deleted" state.)
