The OS X disease

I don't think Tiger has the item count functionality for the Get Info window. Of course it does show at the bottom of the window the number of items in a folder when that folder is open in a window.

paulpen wrote:

I have hundreds of files on this drive, arranged essentially in a tall column 3 or 4 files wide. I DON'T want new folders (or files that i copy or save to the drive) being placed all the way up at the top, out of view to the right because then i have to drag them all the way down to the bottom. Follow? Yet, this is what OSX is doing (usually).

If this is what you mean by "Finder(?) misbehaviour" I, for one, don't understand what you mean.

You might be more likely to get an answer if you gave more details about what you're doing now (eg which View option in Finder is being used), and exactly what you want to achieve.

I'm assuming you are not keeping these hundreds of files on the desktop. If you are, don't - it will bog OSX down.

I have hundreds of files on this drive, arranged essentially in a tall column 3 or 4 files wide. I DON'T want new folders (or files that i copy or save to the drive) being placed all the way up at the top, out of view to the right because then i have to drag them all the way down to the bottom. Follow? Yet, this is what OSX is doing (usually).

If this is on the desktop then as mentioned elsewhere, you shouldn't have so many files on the desktop that it is at all crowded. Files on the desktop use more resources and having hundreds of files on the dektop can cause the computer to freeze.

If this is in a normal Finder window there's a number of settings in the view options in Finder and you may need to see how those affect behavior. For example, if you have "keep arranged by" activated, the number of icons on a row changes to accommodate the window width. If you have no prefereces set, the item you copy to that window goes where you put it.

If I set folders or drives to icon view (which I never usually use) I see two characteristics. If I drag an item to within a folder it goes where I drop it. If I use any other method it goes to the bottom of the icons. I cannot replicate what you report given the limited information you have given about the detail of what you are doing and how.

You might find it easier to get a solution if you stopped ranting about OSX and what you perceive to be its shortcomings and talked more about what you are doing and how to get what you want.

EDIT: I'm assuming that when talking about viewing by icons you do mean viewing as icons (Command-1) not viewing as list (Command-2) which does make use of icons in the diplay?

Rants born out of ignorance will not get you very far here.

You are running an old version of OS X, three generations behind the latest one, and apparently still don't know how to use it properly.

Frankly I never use icon view mode. Never relly used it in OS9 either. I'm 99% of the time in list view mode. If you do have hundreds of files why do you want to view them in icon mode? Talk about having to scroll. :-/

It sounds to me like you are having a browser or connectivity issue. Although I do notice issues with the new ASC editor, it's mostly because I think too much is being done back at Apple and not enough on my computer by my browser. E.g. spell check is all serviced by Apple's server and not being done by my Firefox browser or even Apple's own OSX spellcheck utility.

You obviously have your own reasons for using icons but like Limnos I find it hard to understand why. I suspect icon view is a hangover from the good old days of System 6 and before and really only suitable for dealing with small numbers of items. You may find it more workable if you reorganised icons into a more hierarchical system.

I gave up icons many years ago and find list view much, much better. I do not like column view except for a few specific uses.

In more general terms I just do not recognise your description of OSX. I tend to be a late adopter and stuck with OS9 for a long time before going to 10.3 and did not move to 10.4 (the max for my Quicksilver) until some time after 10.5 was out. When I used OS9 I strongly disliked 10.3 on my occasional forays into Panther but when I did make the break I came to like most of it and found any return to OS9 a major pain. All that is, of course, personal preference, but I have found OSX much more stable than OS9.

This post is being made in Tiger from an old PB on which I have never had any of the posting problems that you describe.

It seems to me that if you are having major issues with stability and such there must be other factors at work such as problems with your system stuff or hardware.

Having said that Tiger is now getting very old and I do notice that some sites have become much slower recently, I suspect due to all the supposedly improving additions to them.

Let's say it did add them on at the bottom. We'd get somebody else posting here complaining that they didn't add onto the side.

Everybody has their own long list of little details they'd like to see changed in operating systems. It's impossible to program in every little detail and frankly a programmer may have done it deliberately so it adds them that way, or simply didn't see it as an issue.