Leopard wish list

On 17 Aug 2006, at 5:11:00 AM, < John C. Welch > wrote:

> > It makes me feel very insecure when to quickly back up a few
> changes to a few
> > files I have to erase and re-write copies of thousands of
> unchanged files.
>
> but that's what a *copy* is. What you want is Finder level
> synchronization,
> which, even if implemented would still be different than a copy
> procedure.

John, what we are talking about is "smart copy" here. There were
utilities for the Classic Mac OS, going back to at least system 6,
that allowed you to drag and drop a folder or all of the files in the
folder and get a dialog box that would allow you to only copy the
files that had changed. What is so hard to understand about this?
It is a very useful and time saving function. In windoze I always
have to have two explorer windows open to the same folder, sort them
both by date, and then select only the files that have a later date
than the latest one in the folder I am copying to. Using smart copy,
I could just drag a folder that had sub-folders, which had sub-
folders, which had sub-folders, etc, and let the computer figure out
which files to copy. If I want to make up a backup of a folder that
has many sub-folders, which have many sub-folders, which have many
sub-folders, etc, the work becomes impossibly difficult. I am
unaware of such a utility, but I have used SuperDuper! to keep an
updated backup of a small external hard disk I have. I haven't tried
to see if I can use it to transfer folders with just a small number
of changed files. Does anyone know if SuperDuper! can be used for
this purpose?


--------------------------------------------------------------------
If the government wants us to obey the law
it should set a better example.

___________________________________________________

Michael Logue The Grateful Union
http://www.earthguild.com/ Earth Guild: Tools Materials Books
mloguemadison.main.nc.us
___________________________________________________

On 8/17/06 15:53, "Michael Logue" <mloguemadison.main.nc.us> wrote:

>>> It makes me feel very insecure when to quickly back up a few
>> changes to a few
>>> files I have to erase and re-write copies of thousands of
>> unchanged files.
>>
>> but that's what a *copy* is. What you want is Finder level
>> synchronization,
>> which, even if implemented would still be different than a copy
>> procedure.
>
> John, what we are talking about is "smart copy" here. There were
> utilities for the Classic Mac OS, going back to at least system 6,
> that allowed you to drag and drop a folder or all of the files in the
> folder and get a dialog box that would allow you to only copy the
> files that had changed. What is so hard to understand about this?

Nothing is hard to understand about this at all. But there's a difference
between "I find it useful" and "It's a good idea to make standard for every
single user on the planet"

The current behavior is exceedingly annoying, but it is also *safe*, and I
can live with that, esp. considering some of the family members I support.

> It is a very useful and time saving function. In windoze I always
> have to have two explorer windows open to the same folder, sort them
> both by date, and then select only the files that have a later date
> than the latest one in the folder I am copying to. Using smart copy,
> I could just drag a folder that had sub-folders, which had sub-
> folders, which had sub-folders, etc, and let the computer figure out
> which files to copy. If I want to make up a backup of a folder that
> has many sub-folders, which have many sub-folders, which have many
> sub-folders, etc, the work becomes impossibly difficult. I am
> unaware of such a utility, but I have used SuperDuper! to keep an
> updated backup of a small external hard disk I have. I haven't tried
> to see if I can use it to transfer folders with just a small number
> of changed files. Does anyone know if SuperDuper! can be used for
> this purpose?

I really hope you aren't thinking that's a terribly common behavior


--
John C. Welch Writer/Analyst
Bynkii.com Mac and other opinions
jwelchbynkii.com

On Aug 17, 2006, at 4:53 PM, John C. Welch wrote:

> On 8/17/06 14:56, "Geoffrey Odhner" <GeoffreyOdhner.net> wrote:
>
>>> You can't test whether a message has been read. You can test
>>> whether
>>> it was made available for reading. The computer can't know that
>>> (the
>>> right human's) eyes and brain read the message while it was
>>> available. And it may not matter--perhaps you read the first
>>> paragraph and went on to the next message--did you intend to come
>>> back, or did you just say "nonsense" (or something like that) and
>>> move on.
>>>
>>> And "no longer selected" has to be "no longer selected OR open in
>>> its
>>> own window" I think.
>>>
>>> All that aside, most of the time for many people, what you said
>>> would
>>> work, so maybe it should be done.
>>
>> Well, yes. When I said "read" I meant that the flag indicating
>> "unread" has been cleared, which happens almost immediately after the
>> message is selected. That flag obviously could be tested, but won't
>> test what I want unless it is combined with the test of whether the
>> message is also selected, or as you say, open in its own window. It
>> was because I was talking about the "unread" flag that I added the
>> qualification about selection, to allow for the reality of the time
>> it takes to actually read the message.
>
> that assumes it's read with a connection to the server. That's not
> a very
> good assumption to make.

What does this have to do with a connection to the server? Mail.app
shows the "unread" flag regardless of whether you are connected to
the server. It clears that flag when you select the message
regardless of whether you are connected to the server. I'm not
talking about the flag on the server, which most POP3 mail clients
seem to ignore, but the blue dot that appears on the line in the
message list browser pane, which can be changed from the menu:
Message > Mark > As Unread, or Message > Mark > As Read. There's
also a pair of buttons for the toolbar which can set or clear this flag.

Geoff

Good afternoon,

On 17/8/06 at 1:53 PM -0700, Michael Logue <mloguemadison.main.nc.us> wrote:

>John, what we are talking about is "smart copy" here. There were
>utilities for the Classic Mac OS, going back to at least system 6,
>that allowed you to drag and drop a folder or all of the files in the
>folder and get a dialog box that would allow you to only copy the
>files that had changed. What is so hard to understand about this?

And there are utilities for OSX that do the same thing. If you don't want to pay
for a third-party utility then you can use rsync which comes with the OS. (Of
course most people don't want to use Terminal for such things, but I'm pretty
sure there is a GUI wrapper for rsync.) Yep, Rsyncx:

<http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/9066>
<http://archive.macosxlabs.org/rsyncx/intro.html>

Seems a bit old, but should achieve what you want.


Charlie

--
   Charlie Garrison <garrisonzeta.org.au>
   PO Box 141, Windsor, NSW 2756, Australia

On 16 Aug 2006, at 17:34 , John C. Welch wrote:
>> It makes me feel very insecure when to quickly back up a few
>> changes to a few
>> files I have to erase and re-write copies of thousands of
>> unchanged files.
>
> but that's what a *copy* is. What you want is Finder level
> synchronization,
> which, even if implemented would still be different than a copy
> procedure.

Which is why waht we want is *smart copy* because it is moronic to
copy 7,984 files that are identical between source and target just to
catch the 16 that have changed.

I've never heard anyone come up with a reasonable reason to copy over
identical files.

--
Your letters they all say that you're beside me now.
Then why do I feel alone?
I'm standing on a ledge and your fine spider web
is fastening my ankle to a stone.

On 17 Aug 2006, at 04:06 , patandcarlo wrote:
> I would like to see Apple have the screen follow the cursor when the
> zoom feature is on. This worked in OS 9, but ever since OSX it does
> not work. As a person who uses zoom all of the time, this is very
> frustrating.

I don't understand, the screen follows the mouse cursor on my Mac.
Always has.

??

--
Is this the light of a new day dawning? A future bright that you can
walk in? No, it's just another Monday Morning, do it all over again!

On Aug 16, 2006, at 11:13 AM, Andrew Laurence wrote:

> For Mail, rules which are triggered manually.

You can manually fire off mail rules using Mail Act-On. It's a great
little utility, and free to use!

<http://www.indev.ca/MailActOn.html>

--Nik

One "wish list" item from the article that no one has really discussed is open plugin APIs from Apple.

I don't think TidBITS went far enough -- the article only mentioned Mail and Safari. What about iPhoto, Aperture, Keynote, Pages, ... Many developers have also asked for a plugin API for XCode, to support other programming languages, developer tools, etc.

Can this just be a general request to Apple? Make some sort of documented plugin API available for all Apple programs! Everything. The "complete package," as it were.

It doesn't need to be set in stone, but a documented API would be extremely helpful. It sure beats having to use reverse-engineering tools.

While we're at it, why do some Apple programs have lousy AppleScript support?

On 8/18/06 15:10, "Geoffrey Odhner" <GeoffreyOdhner.net> wrote:

>>> Well, yes. When I said "read" I meant that the flag indicating
>>> "unread" has been cleared, which happens almost immediately after the
>>> message is selected. That flag obviously could be tested, but won't
>>> test what I want unless it is combined with the test of whether the
>>> message is also selected, or as you say, open in its own window. It
>>> was because I was talking about the "unread" flag that I added the
>>> qualification about selection, to allow for the reality of the time
>>> it takes to actually read the message.
>>
>> that assumes it's read with a connection to the server. That's not
>> a very
>> good assumption to make.
>
> What does this have to do with a connection to the server? Mail.app
> shows the "unread" flag regardless of whether you are connected to
> the server. It clears that flag when you select the message
> regardless of whether you are connected to the server. I'm not
> talking about the flag on the server, which most POP3 mail clients
> seem to ignore, but the blue dot that appears on the line in the
> message list browser pane, which can be changed from the menu:
> Message > Mark > As Unread, or Message > Mark > As Read. There's
> also a pair of buttons for the toolbar which can set or clear this flag.


Okay, you're still assuming that mail is only read with an active network
connection. That's still not a good idea, especially with POP. It's not
really reliable with IMAP. If I'm reading mail offline, your read flag can
take days to be sent, if I allow it to be sent at all.

--
John C. Welch Writer/Analyst
Bynkii.com Mac and other opinions
jwelchbynkii.com

On 8/18/06 15:10, "Google Kreme" <gkremegmail.com> wrote:

>> but that's what a *copy* is. What you want is Finder level
>> synchronization,
>> which, even if implemented would still be different than a copy
>> procedure.
>
> Which is why waht we want is *smart copy* because it is moronic to
> copy 7,984 files that are identical between source and target just to
> catch the 16 that have changed.
>
> I've never heard anyone come up with a reasonable reason to copy over
> identical files.

A corrupt file may not show as changed, depending on how you define
"changed". In that case, are you going to individually test 7K files to find
the handful that are corrupt, or just blow it out and recopy from a known
good source and be done with it.

Usually, if you only have a handful of files that have changed recently, you
can find them in the folder window with ease. View as list, sort by changed
date. Contiguous select, drag and drop.

--
John C. Welch Writer/Analyst
Bynkii.com Mac and other opinions
jwelchbynkii.com

On the subject of Nicknames in Mail: Leopard should add the ability to autocomplete based on nicknames already stored in Address Book. The field exists there for contacts, but at the moment Mail doesn't see it. So much for the dual purpose of nicknames.

To Michael Logue, Lewis Butler, et al:

You don't use the words "copy a file" (with or without the word
"smart") to mean "copy only those parts of a file that have changed".

So why should you expect the words "copy a folder" (with or without
the word "smart") to mean "copy only those parts of a folder that
have changed"?

Your insistence on confusing terminology won't help you get what you
really want, which is what everyone else is calling synchronization
of folder contents.

Carl

[Susan Kayser]
> Another inconvenience I've been suffering comes when I use Mail to
> access my email, which I get from Comcast. When I'm away from home
> (and
> my cable modem), I need a different setting for the port, etc. to be
> able to send email via Mail and Comcast. Yet the Mail program won't
> let
> me set up an account for the "away" settings; it tells me that I can
> have only one Comcast account

What version of Mail is this? With Mail 2.1 I have no problem
creating two SMTP server accounts, with the same domain, the same or
different ports, and the same or different authentication.

> [Right! A proper Location Manager is one of the things we hope to
> see in Leopard, and automatically switching SMTP servers is
> certainly part of that. -Joe]

Mail won't currently automatically switch, which would be nice, but
it will pop up a 'can't send with x server, would you like to use one
of these' dialog, which provides the functionality manually, with
very little hassle.

=Tony.Meyer

On Aug 20, 2006, at 4:53 PM, John C. Welch wrote:

> On 8/18/06 15:10, "Geoffrey Odhner" <GeoffreyOdhner.net> wrote:
>
>>>> Well, yes. When I said "read" I meant that the flag indicating
>>>> "unread" has been cleared, which happens almost immediately
>>>> after the
>>>> message is selected. That flag obviously could be tested, but
>>>> won't
>>>> test what I want unless it is combined with the test of whether the
>>>> message is also selected, or as you say, open in its own
>>>> window. It
>>>> was because I was talking about the "unread" flag that I added the
>>>> qualification about selection, to allow for the reality of the time
>>>> it takes to actually read the message.
>>>
>>> that assumes it's read with a connection to the server. That's not
>>> a very
>>> good assumption to make.
>>
>> What does this have to do with a connection to the server? Mail.app
>> shows the "unread" flag regardless of whether you are connected to
>> the server. It clears that flag when you select the message
>> regardless of whether you are connected to the server. I'm not
>> talking about the flag on the server, which most POP3 mail clients
>> seem to ignore, but the blue dot that appears on the line in the
>> message list browser pane, which can be changed from the menu:
>> Message > Mark > As Unread, or Message > Mark > As Read. There's
>> also a pair of buttons for the toolbar which can set or clear this
>> flag.
>
>
> Okay, you're still assuming that mail is only read with an active
> network
> connection. That's still not a good idea, especially with POP. It's
> not
> really reliable with IMAP. If I'm reading mail offline, your read
> flag can
> take days to be sent, if I allow it to be sent at all.

I am not making any such assumption at all. Mail.app doesn't turn
its flag on and off based on a remote server, but based on my direct
interaction with the application, and stores it in the local
database. Where do you get the idea that I'm talking about an active
connection? I don't expect Mail.app to send the flag to the server
immediately, I just want to be able to have the rule, which should be
running *locally*, and which should be triggered by the change in
status caused by my reading the email, to also be sensitive to the
fact that I've indicated that I've probably finished reading it, but
closing the window, and deselecting the message. That has nothing to
do with being online.

Geoff

On 8/17/06, Nigel Stanger <nstangerinfoscience.otago.ac.nz> wrote:
> On 16/8/2006 5:40 PM, "Rob Russell" <sumwaregmail.com> spake thus:
>
> > I can't think of how many times I want to see the progress of a long
> > operation in the second application (large import, convert file
> > formats, downloading over a pathetic internet connection...).
> > Command-tab, then command-tab is clumsy as it has to activate the
> > background app, which can show delays.
>
> Why not just hit F9? As long as the progress bar is in a "normal" (i.e.,
> non-floating) window, it'll show up in the window collection.

You haven't seen how many windows I end up having running. It takes a
while to scan them all.

I rarely use F9 for that reason. That crispy Dunedin air obviously
helps your eyesight :-)

> This is
> actually better in general than just sliding away the windows of the front
> application, because it's quite likely that the thing you want to see is
> buried under windows from several other applications (well, it's quite
> likely for me, at least :) The "Shift-F11" solution wouldn't help with
> that.

Well, no. My point was that I'm often doing something and switch to
another program. I'm leaving the app that was doing something
(FileMaker or Mailsmith) and the window of the busy/slow process is
likely the front one.

The idea of Shift-F11 is to exactly solve that.

What might be more useful is for Apple to expose (sorry) the Expose
API so we can do what we like (well, those that code in Objective C++)

And no, Google Kreme, it has occurred to me that I haven't suggested
it to Apple. Good thinking 99.

Rob

> A corrupt file may not show as changed, depending on how you define
> "changed". In that case, are you going to individually test 7K files to find
> the handful that are corrupt, or just blow it out and recopy from a known
> good source and be done with it.

There have got to be more efficient solutions to this sort of problem than
erasing and recopying thousands of files. My copies are not made to a static
backup, but to a portable disk so they can be copied between computers.
That's a minimum of four copies a day (home disk-->transfer disk,
transfer-->work, work-->transfer, transfer--home). The Finder's insistence
on aborting a copy of 8,000 files because just one is corrupt drives me
crazy. Why not pop up a warning: "The following files were corrupt and could
not be copied" with the ability to quickly determine where they are. To get
really fancy, the Finder could check the target file it was trying to
replace and find out if it was corrupt too and give you the chance to leave
it unchanged.
 
> Usually, if you only have a handful of files that have changed recently, you
> can find them in the folder window with ease. View as list, sort by changed
> date. Contiguous select, drag and drop.

My work is structured for all sorts of reasons in a complex set of folders;
finding the changed and new items in the various folders and routing them
into the proper target folders by hand would be open to far more errors than
the sort of drag-and-drop that Speed Copy used to provide.

Rsync would work fine if it had a really sensible Apple-style interface; but
I found rxyncX, for instance, highly ambiguous and confusing, and gave up on
it after making one too many mistakes copying in the wrong direction.

Note that I'm not saying "smart copying" should be the default behavior of
the finder; only that it ought to be an option, provided perhaps through a
menu setting or a control key.



Paul Brians
Professor of English
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of English
Washington State University
Pullman, WA 99164-2050
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/

> You don't use the words "copy a file" (with or without the word
> "smart") to mean "copy only those parts of a file that have changed".
>
> So why should you expect the words "copy a folder" (with or without
> the word "smart") to mean "copy only those parts of a folder that
> have changed"?
>
> Your insistence on confusing terminology won't help you get what you
> really want, which is what everyone else is calling synchronization
> of folder contents

"Smart copy" is a very old term used commercially by Symantec to describe
their behavior of their utility "Copy Doubler," which became "Speed Copy."
If you never used it, you may not have been familiar with the term, but it
became pretty standard for this sort of behavior.

The problem with using "synchronization" is that it can be highly ambiguous.
It can mean making changes only to the target disk, or changing both disks
to match each other. It doesn't even necessarily designate the direction of
the copy. "Smart copy" may not be any more inherently clear, but it does
have a history in the Macintosh world, and that's why I used it. I didn't
make it up.

Many of us who used Speed Copy regularly have mourned it ever since. It
never once caused me a problem until a System change broke it and Symantec
gave up on it.

Paul Brians
Professor of English
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of English
Washington State University
Pullman, WA 99164-2050
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/

[OK, let's wind this particular branch of the discussion down. -Adam]


On 21 Aug 2006, at 5:00:48 AM, <John C. Welch Date> wrote:

> A corrupt file may not show as changed, depending on how you define
> "changed". In that case, are you going to individually test 7K
> files to find
> the handful that are corrupt, or just blow it out and recopy from a
> known
> good source and be done with it.
>
> Usually, if you only have a handful of files that have changed
> recently, you
> can find them in the folder window with ease. View as list, sort by
> changed
> date. Contiguous select, drag and drop.

John, if I made a copy of a file some time in the past, why should I
assume that that copied file is corrupt while the he old, unchanged
file is not? Who has not tried to open up a file that has not been
opened for a while and found it corrupted. What saves your ass is the
copy. If I had been continually copying that file to my backup,
whenever the file I am copying from became corrupt, the corrupt file
would have overwritten my good copy. Now I have two corrupted files,
and no good one, unless I have an old backup somewhere that I made
before the file went bad. What you are saying makes no sense. It
has been my experience that every time I copy a file I run the risk
of file corruption. I have already copied those files from a known
good source, how is recopying these unchanged files somehow safer?
And must I somehow check all those files and determine that they are
good before I copy? It has been my experience that files on two
entirely separate disks don't usually become corrupt at the same
time. And if smart copy is so unnecessary how come all backup
programs provide that function?

Viewing a folder sorted by modified date only works in practice if
you have only one folder with changed files. What if you have
several, and they are all in sub-folders . If I am copying a folder
that has sub-folders, and each sub-folder has sub-folders, and some
of those folder have sub-folders, and on and on down who knows how
many levels, what you are suggesting is so time consuming that I
would never have the time to go home. And then when I am home, I
would have to do the very same thing in reverse, else Apple would
delete all my unchanged files when it copied the folders that have
only the changed files. Some of us have to transport files back and
forth from one location to another. You are very fortunate that you
don't have to do this every day, but some of us have to do this, and
we would prefer the computer to do the work which it is capable of
and not make us do it. It makes no sense to me for someone to
logically prove to me to their satisfaction that I don't need to do
what I need to do.

Yes I am aware that I could conceivably do what I want to do by
typing some unix command with the proper switches and parameters, but
I don't trust my typing or knowledge of unix to get that right every
time I need to do a smart copy. If there are commercial utilities
that would do what Smart Copy from Connectix did for system 9, please
tell me what they are. The only one I could find was RysyncX, which
seemed much too confusing and complicated for what I want, especially
since I think I can make Superduper!, which I already have, do what I
want.

I don't want to cause a flame war here, all I want is a way to do
something which I need to do and which seems eminently reasonable to
me, and obviously, to several other people on this list.

___________________________________________________
Michael Logue The Grateful Union
http://www.earthguild.com/ Earth Guild: Tools Materials Books
mloguemadison.main.nc.us

[Last word on this branch... -Adam]


On 21 Aug 2006, at 5:00:48 AM, <Carl S Zimmerman> wrote:

> Your insistence on confusing terminology won't help you get what you
> really want, which is what everyone else is calling synchronization
> of folder contents.

I think I know what synchronization is, I don't want
synchronization. I don't understand why "Smart Copy" is confusing
terminology. It seems very clear to me, and to those who wrote the
utilities that I used on my Macs running system 6 through 9. When I
do a copy in "Smart Copy" on system 8 or 9, I get 3 choices, if the
folders I am copying from and to have different names, I get:
"Replace", "Smart Replace" or "Cancel". If the folders have the same
name, I get: "Replace", "Synchronize Folders", "Smart Replace" or
"Cancel" Excuse me if I thought synchronize means to copy all the
changed files from each folder to the other, leaving the folders
identical, while smart copy meant to copy only the changed files from
one folder to the other. Often the folder I am copying from my zip
disk has a different name than the folder to which I am copying on my
home or work computer. Sometimes the folder on my work or home
computer has many more files than the one on my zip disk. Often this
is because the zip disk doesn't have enough room to hold all the
files that my home or work computer holds. Therefore I cannot
synchronize the folders. So I say again, I don't want
synchronization. This may never come up for you, but it does for me.
You ubergeeks may find my terminology confusing according to your
strict criteria, but as a lay English speaker, I find using the same
word to designate two entirely different functions to be confusing.

I truly don't understand this refusal by some of you to not
understand what some of us would like, your refusal to understand our
explanations of what we want, and your total rejection of our need to
do want we need to do.

___________________________________________________
Michael Logue The Grateful Union
http://www.earthguild.com/ Earth Guild: Tools Materials Books
mloguemadison.main.nc.us

At 12:50 PM -0700 2006/08/21, Paul Brians wrote:

> A corrupt file may not show as changed, depending on how you define > "changed". In that case, are you going to individually test 7K files to find > the handful that are corrupt, or just blow it out and recopy from a known > good source and be done with it.

There have got to be more efficient solutions to this sort of problem than erasing and recopying thousands of files. My copies are not made to a static backup, but to a portable disk so they can be copied between computers. That's a minimum of four copies a day (home disk-->transfer disk, transfer-->work, work-->transfer, transfer--home). The Finder's insistence on aborting a copy of 8,000 files because just one is corrupt drives me crazy. Why not pop up a warning: "The following files were corrupt and could not be copied" with the ability to quickly determine where they are. To get really fancy, the Finder could check the target file it was trying to replace and find out if it was corrupt too and give you the chance to leave it unchanged.

The way a disk or operating system defines "corrupt" is basically either:

When I try to read the file, it fails, or When I try to write the file, it fails

There's no way to know a write will fail without writing the file. You could read a file to verify it, but it's no different than reading a file to copy it.

Leaving aside terminology and the Finder (which might get this feature in Leopard, but I doubt it), the best answer for you is probably to use a tool like Synchronize Plus X (there are many alternatives), and put a couple icons in your Dock. You can click one to update your Transfer folder on the Mac from the external disk, and vice-versa. At home you'd have one pair of Synchronize documents, and at work another pair.

I agree the Finder should add "Skip" to the copy/move error window, and another to find the problematic file, but there's no need to wait for it.

> Usually, if you only have a handful of files that have changed recently, you > can find them in the folder window with ease. View as list, sort by changed > date. Contiguous select, drag and drop.

My work is structured for all sorts of reasons in a complex set of folders; finding the changed and new items in the various folders and routing them into the proper target folders by hand would be open to far more errors than the sort of drag-and-drop that Speed Copy used to provide.

Rsync would work fine if it had a really sensible Apple-style interface; but I found rxyncX, for instance, highly ambiguous and confusing, and gave up on it after making one too many mistakes copying in the wrong direction.

Do you really need resource forks and type and creator codes? If not, "cp -Rp" might do the trick. Once you get a working command, you can put it into a .command file (make it executable) and put that into the Dock so you don't have to type anything. Just launch copy-to-transfer.command normally, and it will run. Doing something like "rsync -a ~/Transfer/ /Volumes/Transfer/" in your .command file would be much faster (still not updating resource forks and type/creator codes).

Note that I'm not saying "smart copying" should be the default behavior of the finder; only that it ought to be an option, provided perhaps through a menu setting or a control key.

It would be a nice feature, but don't hold your breath. It would be more complicated, and Apple likes things "as simple as possible, but no simpler" these days (sometimes too simple!).

Chris -- Chris Pepper: <http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/> <http://www.reppep.com/weblog/pepper/> Rockefeller University: <http://www.rockefeller.edu/>