osx finder “WOAH”s

Daring Fireball has a new rant about the finder which (although it does a little backpedaling) is a far more convincing argument for his original point, which is basically, that the OSX finder sucks ass.

I have been using OSX since the beta. I have intentionally put up with the slowness and inconsistent nature of the finder, assuming that, as with other problems in OSX, they will eventually get fixed. This is still my belief, although it may take a bit more whining from intelligent people like John Gruber and Jeffrey Zeldman before it happens.

In the mean time, I have never done it, but there are supposedly some 3rd party finder replacements out there. (doing a search, I found a few whose pages are down… I wonder why. Only one I could find that is presumably still in development, and its page is in Japanese.) Anyway, an old post on on macosxhints.com is probably the only reason I knew about this, and I had to dig to find it.

The real reason I have beef with the osx finder personally, is that at work I have been using OSX’s built-in samba mount capabilities to mount our dev sites. This means that I’ve been using the finder much more extensively, mostly in a drag and drop fashion. (Although it’s nice to be able to point my terminal at those mounts and vim them locally, for this particular project I’ve mostly been using dreamweaver.) Anyway, for whatever reason, either samba or the finder are creating weird invisible files on the mounted servers. They look like this:._filename.html. Is this normal? WTF? It’s as annoying as hell when I go to commit the stuff to CVS, because these directories contain twice as many files as they should!

In the next post, Gruber rants about Wired’s poor mac coverage. (They have one guy who writes a mac column, and he’s a moron.) I’d agree with him that the coverage is horrible, (and that the guy is a moron), but at the same time — since when have they had serious hardware coverage? I don’t really think that’s their “bag”, so to speak. The only reason they employ this mac guy is to explore the self-titled “cult of mac”, which I have to admit is fairly funny, and interesting. It does leave one with the impression that all mac users are freaks, however. (Then again, I like being called a freak.)

I’d just like to point out that I hate when I wake up at 5 AM and can’t sleep almost as much as I hate those invisible files.

enough geeky blogging. back to bed…

UPDATE: Westwind computing hosts a page on Mac OS X Hidden Files & Directories that solved the ._filename.html question. It’s still stupid now that I know why it happens.