Sunday, 4 June 2006
OpenAlpha
Ever noticed that, when you drag a bunch of documents from the Finder onto an application, the order in which they open is often the exact opposite of what you want, if not outright random?
I’ve cursed this behavior several times, though never cared enough to do something about it—but Cameron Kaiser has. OpenAlpha is his solution: drop your files onto it instead, and they’ll be opened in alphabetical order. It uses my launch tool to do the opening; pretty cool to see my software not only being used, but embedded.
8:31 AM
I think documents are opened in the order you selected them. Which I find quite intuitive.
I think documents are opened in the order you selected them. Which I find quite intuitive.
This appears to be yet another case where the Finder only works properly in column view. Yay.
So I create a folder and touch {1..9}.txt. Go to the Finder, select all, open (in TextEdit).
In icon view: 6, 3, 4, 9, 5, 8, 1, 2, 7.
In list view: 7, 2, 1, 8, 5, 9, 4, 3, 6.
In column view: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
That’s really odd. So far I’ve always liked how the Finder does that, but I could reproduce your problem (in yet another order, though). I must have been using column view when observing that.
I have to agree that the total behaviour is completely absurd. And it’s probably an ‘interesting’ code base that makes this behaviour possible.