>Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2002 11:14:07 -0400
>From: Andrew Stiller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>Oh so *that's* what this is about!  Simple (in fact, I've been doing this
>all along w.o thinking): Just put both the app. and its docs in a folder
>that has a slightly different title than the app. itself. My Finale folder,
>e.g., is called simply "Finale," not "Finale 2002a."

How effective this trick is depends upon the app. But if it works for you 
and Finale, fine. Just, if you've got 4,398 Finale documents, you will 
probably want to organize some subfolder hierarchy to avoid total chaos 
anyway.

I'm a little suprised that all you've got are Finale docs. What do you 
use for Kallisti covers? Prefaces/postfaces/author's notes/title pages? I 
know some people do use Finale as an ersatz for everything from PageMaker 
and Illustrator to Excel, but I would (perhaps naively) have thought that 
with something as extensive as the Kallisti catalogue doing _everything_ 
with Finale would have long since proved overly tedious. I would also 
have assumed that having (say) the title page for "Nightmare Music" in 
Word folder, the cover in the PageMaker folder, and the score in the 
Finale folder... no, no, I really have a hard time imagining organizing 
things that way. But that may just be my lack of imagination.

There are just lots and lots of situations where a project-oriented file 
organization just won't fit in with an application-oriented organization. 
Which is why I was astonished at your astonishment about something other 
than an application-oriented file organization. But, I'm not tellin' yeh 
howda org'nize yer disk. Ah'm jes' tryin' to say thar's some 
spittin'-good reasons tuhdo elsewise.


Anyway: the documents/applications folders were never in any way 
_enforced_ w/OS 8/9. They were just a pre-configuration. Presumably there 
to discourage naive users from starting life by littering the Desktop 
with hundreds of documents.

Having taught naive users and done tech support, I can assure you that 
document-strewn desktops is a reality (I'm talking >100 documents orders 
of magnitude, here). And one that has the unfortunate side effect of 
slowing down the startup process when it gets to that stage.

It is true that hundreds and hundreds of documents at the top level of a 
documents folder will slow things down when the folder is opened. But, it 
is a lot easier to diagnose "why does my documents folder take so long to 
open?" (Tech support's first question: how many documents in the folder?) 
than "why does my machine take so long to start up?" (Tech support: 
ummm... SCSI chain? hard disk? system extensions? trying to mount a 
non-existant server?...). In fact, the first situation is so much easier 
to diagnose that many users will work it out for themselves before even 
calling tech support. And the whole point of the Mac was supposed to be 
that folks would work out how the machine works without needing advice 
from specialists (never mind any discrepancies between theory and 
practice).


>From experience to date with OS X (fairly minimal), even there you aren't 
_forced_ to follow an applications/documents dichotomy. Leastaways, not 
w/a single user machine. In a multi-user environment, sysadmin/root will 
probably put a stop to people littering any applications folders with 
documents. In a lab-style environment, allowing such is just begging 
chaos and catastrophe to come.


Cheers,

Peter


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