On 22 Apr 2002, at 23:55, Philip Aker wrote: > D. W. Fenton wrote: > > >>> Surely there's a system setting somewhere that allows you to > >>> alter the default application and document settings? In > >>> Windows there are registry settings for all the appropriate > >>> system-defined folders and if you change the setting in the > >>> registry, all applications will then honor that choice. That's > >>> the way you get rid of C:\My Documents, if you don't like that > >>> (as I don't; what was wrong with "Documents" as a folder > >>> name:?), or how you move your default program installation > >>> folder to a different volume. > > J. Gebauer: > > >> A Mac works a little different from a PC. And I hesitate to go > >> on from here... > > DWF: > > > Well, of *course* I know that Macs are different. > > > But why wouldn't this be a user-changable setting? > > > I didn't mean to suggest that there was a system registry on > > the Mac, only that there must of necessity to be a structure in > > the Mac OS similar in function to the system registry (a place > > for storing system settings) and, presumable, a UI somewhere > > for modifying those settings. > > You're still thinking in Bill's terms about what a "system" is. > For MacOS < X the whole metaphor is different than Unix and M$. > It's possible to have several System Folders on the same disk > partition and "bless" one of them to be the active one on > re-start. Consequently, paths are relative to the current system > and not as you describe above: "C:\My Documents" and a > (logically) single system registry.
That changes nothing whatsoever. In Windows, even Win95, there can be multiple settings for system file locations other than the ones for the OS itself, stored in user profiles. > This implies that whatever Control Panel one activates to change > a certain system default setting doesn't change the settings of > the system folder it currently "belongs" to. I don't see how this changes anything whatsoever. The location of applications and documents ought to be a configurable choice. To *not* make it configurable is authoritarian, and that's so antithetical to everything Apple has ever professed to stand for that I can't believe that it would be so. That you can delete the folders and they reappear only when application installers are hardwired to use them suggests to me that, perhaps, these locations are just recommendations and are not, in fact, controlled by any OS or user environment setting. I suspect that things are different in OS X in terms of configurability. If they are not, then it is simply poor system design. -- David W. Fenton | http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates | http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
