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When I got my web design job in 2003, I had to switch over to mac after being a PC user all my life. With OS X it wasn’t that bad of a switch; some things were more intuitive, like being able to drag and drop a file into an application’s shortcut in the dock (as opposed to dragging a file to the taskbar application shortcut, waiting for the application to maximize, then dragging it into the application). Some thing swere less intuitive, like the fact that terminal is an application buried in a subfolder when the OS is based on a command line interface, or how DVD player is an application also buried and not integrated into the OS (it launches when you insert a DVD, but if you quit the application you have to launch it again to play the DVD, there’s no easy way to play a DVD already in your drive.)

All in all though, I like OS X better now than windows XP. Its crash support is amazing; if an application crashes it almost never affects other applications nor does it grind the machine down to a halt. It’s prettier and for the most part, the details in the OS are really what shine.

There was one thing that always bugged me though, that drove me nuts about OS X: its file dialogs for opening and saving files. I should go into a critique of all of the things that bug me about it, but the main problem was when I was doing web design in golive:

Let’s say you’re in golive and you have 15 images to add. You click on the browse button in the inspector and it opens the documents folder. You browse to the desktop, to your website folder, to the site folder, to the images folder and select the first image. Ok. Then you click on the second image and click browse. And you’re back in the documents folder and have to do it all over again. Golive also uses the “stupid” open dialog, that is, it doesn’t give you the recent folders menu to select the folder you were just in. This wasted hours of my time!
In OS 9, there was a system preference that let you choose where to save and open all of your documents. You could choose the last folder used by that application, the folder set by the application, or the documents folder. I believe this was possible in 10.1 and 10.2 as well.

This preference was done away with in OS X 10.3+ and above, because apple revised their ‘navigation services’ code.

Anyway, the solution. Unfortunately, this is a solution that costs money, or it bugs you every time you boot your computer if you don’t pay. It’s a shareware solution. But I can’t work efficently on my mac without it. It’s Default Folder X. Get it here:

http://www.stclairsoft.com/DefaultFolderX/

It has a lot of nifty features like folder bookmarks, default application folders, directory tree drop downs, etc., some of which are disabled when the shareware expires. But the only thing that I really need and use all the time, are these preferences which are the default preferences when the shareware expires:

Basically it tells OS X, ’stop throwing me in the documents folder and put me back where I just was.’ Thank you default folder X! Problem solved for now, unless someone can tell me how to hack OS X myself to do this.

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