Two interface changes coming to Snow Leopard have been revealed by those who have access to the developer releases of Apple’s upcoming operating system. The trash gained a feature to directly move files back to their original locations, and the stacks feature has been improved by making directories browseable within the stacks themselves. They join ZFS, on-demand printer drivers, and location awareness as new features for Snow Leopard.
Believe it or not, but the Mac OS X trash can did not have the ability to send files back to where they came from; you had to manually copy/paste/drag them back to their original location. In the new Snow Leopard builds, a feature called “Put back” has been added, which will move any selected files from the trash back to where they came from. Users who remember Mac OS 9 and earlier will know this features as “Put away”.
The Stacks feature in Leopard has always received many, many criticism for being rather limited in its functionality. One of the most often requested features was the ability to navigate the directory tree from within the stack, without having to open a Finder window. In Leopard, clicking a directory in a stack would simply open a Finder window; in Snow Leopard, it will shrink the original ‘window’ to a small representation in the top-right corner.
Snow Leopard might be a performance and maintenance release, but that doesn’t mean Apple isn’t applying some fixes and adding some small features here and there as well.
this will be now known as the release, which finally put macos x back to par with macos 9
sorry, just had to ! i really enjoyed the classic macos back in the day (despite the lack of stability etc
I liked macOS classic as well, aside from that stupid strip thing they added in 9 or so
And now restore from trash. I can’t believe these were things that weren’t always there.
Well, they were there…just not in OS X
which is bizarre as I swear my NeXT running NEXTSTEP 3.3 can restore files back to their location from the recycler. I could be wrong, tho. I need to check that when I get off work
i call everyone who says osx has great usability a liar!
a damn f–king liar to be more precise
let the downmoding beginn
Edited 2009-02-13 18:28 UTC
Thank you for sharing this useful information!
He’s trolling, don’t feed him.
It’s really funny. When I started to use OS X i was very angry that there was no put away / restore command. I even wrote blog entries about it.
Since then I got used to it so much that I think I would never use it again.
It’s almost the same with the Cut command in Finder however i would use that happily ever after.
Will they activate the disabled Command+X in 10.7? lol
I, for one, sure hope so. I would love to have the cut command in Finder, and I don’t see why Apple doesn’t. Then again, Finder has never exactly been the most useful part of OS X imho and, in many respects, is lagging behind most other file managers on other oses.
As far as I know they called the cut command “destructive” that’s why they disabled it. Let alone the fact that on other operating systems the Cut command just signs files/folders to be cut out and then the paste command will move them to the new location. Or I don’t know the real reason why they disabled it.
Apple likes consistency, and as you just described, that command isn’t Cut at all — it’s an “I’m thinking about moving this file” command. The expected behavior of cut is to delete something and move it to the clipboard. Which component of the behavior is more obvious to a user? It would be silly to use cut when you want to delete, but it’s easy to envision a scenario where a user wouldn’t know the difference. Just as a matter of trivia, since I’m not in Windows right now and can’t check, can you cut files once and paste twice?
In Windows? Ah– no, actually… which is a surprise to me. I’ve never needed to cut and then paste the file twice, so I haven’t tried it until now. But I had assumed that would be possible since you can cut text and then paste it as many times as you like in basically any program utilizing copyable text. Weird. Funny how something so simple can elude you for so long until you actually bother to test it, and you find out your assumption was wrong.
Completely agree with you there, in case a user want to use cut paste he/she can choose the move command through the terminal.
You know, I just wasted 10 minutes of my life to register to this site to be able to reply to you.
You are a god damned idiot that truly deserves to be dragged out flailing into a back alley and shot like a stray dog.
What you describe is not that Apple likes consistency, it’s that you like rationalizations to prevent your precious world view from being shaken that Apple might not be perfect.
Cut and paste is neither destructive, nor inconsistent, and the sooner slime like you stop polluting the billions of mac blogs like so many Terry Shiavo supporters, the sooner professionals who produce thousands of times more value in this society and use this feature will stop having to rely on script hacks and use a feature like it was meant to be.
If you don’t like the feature, shut the f–k up and don’t use it bitch. Quit interfering with other peoples’ habits. You f–king liberal hypocrite.
Such vitriol, and over nothing. Cut and paste in a file manager is completely different from cut and paste in a text editor, as the useful reply above shows: you can’t paste twice from a cut, and if you don’t paste, you didn’t cut. That doesn’t mean Apple’s decision is absolutely correct or perfectly wise. The inconsistency is just a far more likely reason for them to have made that decision than, say, they can’t engineer something that simple despite all their high tech products, or they just hate you and want to see you suffer.
I thought I’d shed some light on why Apple would do it differently from everyone else. Sorry to offend you by seeing past my own minor inconveniences.
Are you saying that “THE GREATEST OS IN THE UNIVERSE” ((C) S. P. Jobs) hasn’t had restore from trash since, like, forever?
I’m stunned.
I mean. Why bother having trash if you can’t restore files? Might as well just delete them permanently.
To be honest I felt the same several years ago but sooner or later you have to realize that these are really small things. Restore from trash is not that useful at all so in fact I don’t even get why they put back the Put Back.
To be honest again I think it would be better to add a feature to disable the Trash itself (as you can do it on other operating systems) because I never use the Trash. I can decide what I want to delete and what I do not want. It’s never happened to me that I deleted something by accident. Even if I got used to the unavoidable Trash in Mac OS I’m still feeling disturbed that I have to delete everything twice (first with command-backspace then with command-shift-backspace).
I never used it either. On the few occasions where I did delete something by accident, I just went back in the trash and copied it out manually. Of course, those’re the times I did remember to use the trash. the other times, my reaction was to use some words I probably shouldn’t use here.
No, apparently you have no idea what you are talking about.
The restore command will return the file from the trash to the exact location where it was originally.
As of right now, you can go into the trash and pull out anything…this just adds refiling capabilities automatically.
I think everybody knows what the restore / put away / put back command does.
It’s happened to me once. In however many years I’ve been doing things. And that’s because I was using 2xexplorer and the wrong pane had focus. Other than that, shift-delete hasn’t bitten me yet. But I wouldn’t trust everyone with that
aesiamun was not responding to you. He was responding to this:
[q]I mean. Why bother having trash if you can’t restore files? Might as well just delete them permanently.[/i]
See 1st response…
I was answering the parent, not you…he didn’t know that you could remove things from the trash and put them back manually.
I’ve so rarely had to restore something I’ve put in the trash that I never really noticed this particular lacking feature! Nice that it is being added for those people who use it.
Mac OS X has always been able to restore from the Trash, all you have to do is just drag (or copy or whatever) the file out of the Trash to wherever you want it to go.
“Put Back” is just a way to restore the file to directly where it was deleted from (instead of having to drag it back). It’s weird this hasn’t been around all along, but don’t make it sound like you couldn’t restore at all. You always could.
Since OSX introduced ‘undo’ in Finder – which can move back the last file / folder (e. g. when put into the trash by accident), the ‘put back’ feature for the trash is not that important anymore.
Normally, you’re instantly aware that you deleted a file/folder by accident and just make an ‘undo’.
I don’t know anyone who puts files/folders into the trash and then – before deleting them – checks the trash’s content to decide which item should be really deleted.
That is freaking hilarious. Nine years and they’ve only just added Put Away back into the operating system. What’s next – a customizable Apple menu? How about tabbed folders? Does OS X have clippings, and if not do you reckon they’ll be added?
Also, the reason why the Cut function has been disabled is due to the way Mac OS X now handles files – believe it or not, if you use the “Save” function of a program to save your work, OS X deletes the original file and then writes the new file. That’s how the operating system handles files; yes, I know, it’s unbelievably dumb. That’s why “Cut” is a destructive command, because the file would get deleted before it would get pasted. You’d better not forget to paste and you’d better not try and cut or copy something else before pasting!