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Which idiot came up with the idea of save dialogs? I mean, I have a
finder window open here (Explorer, I can see you from here, wipe that grin
off your face - you do this too.) It *is* the representation of that
directory on the file system. It should be to me one and the same thing.
Right, now I want to save this file from this application into that
directory. Right, File -> Save As. Okay, now all I have to do is tell
the program to save it into this window and all will be fine.
What's that, my little application? You want me to navigate to the same
place again using the world's smallest dialog? You can't be serious! I've
got the window open here! Look, just save it there damnit! No, little
application, I have no idea where that finder window is located on the
hard drive. You see, I loaded it up from a alias. I think it's in my
home directory somewhere? Does that help?
This of course, is pure insanity of the worst kind. Whoever came up with
the idea of reinventing a whole secondary Finder/Explorer system in order
to save a file, rather than using the perfectly good one the user has
already, needs a good kicking.
Of course, ten years ago, before Windows 95 was all the rage, in this
country we had RISC OS computers (that's Acorn to you crazy foreign
people.) RISC OS was simple. It popped open a box containing a icon of
the file when you wanted to save and you just dragged it to where you
wanted to save it to (yes, directly onto the equivalent of the
Finder/Explorer window) and it saved it there. It was that easy.
Of course, it was more powerful than that. You could drag documents to
other applications and it would 'save' them into the application directly.
But that's just crazy talk. Next thing people will be having shells that
can pipe output from one program to the next.
Mark.
--
#!/usr/bin/perl -T
use strict;
use warnings;
print q{Mark Fowler, mark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx, http://twoshortplanks.com/};
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