Comments on: Even Apple sometimes screws up UI

By: Abdul Qabiz

Abdul Qabiz — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 11:51:36 +0000

Good catch, no one is perfect… :)

-abdul

By: Eunix

Eunix — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 02:54:53 +0000

True enough. Come to think of it, I guess I’ve done the same thing in the past — but using chown +R from a terminal, I never noticed the discrepancy. I’ve never been a big fan of the Finder itself, and while the “Application package” idea is nifty for installation/simplicity, it does seem like things would be simpler if Apple just admitted that an “app” is little more than a directory — and treated it as such.

By: Josh

Josh — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 22:00:20 +0000

I’m not sure what sharon means by “I want to run in IE, not Firefox”. Buzzword runs fine in Firefox.

By: sharon

sharon — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 20:28:06 +0000

I tried to run Buzzword in Firefox in WinXP, and it told me I didn’t have the latest version of Flash. It prompted me to download and install a newer version, and when I said “yes,” it told me I had to close Firefox first. HUH? ;-)

Of course I realized that what it really meant was “I want to run in Internet Explorer, not Firefox.” That was a little disappointing. But it really is a slick interface, so I’ll probably take the risk.

Do you know if there are plans to add other office applications? I would expect so.

By: JulesLt

JulesLt — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 20:15:15 +0000

I think you’re right, in that for an app bundle you almost certainly want to cascade the change of owner – I’m wagering it’s just one of those edge cases that no one actually thought of – the guys doing Get Info obviously recognised you might want to cascade changes on a Folder. but it’s not recognising that an app bundle really contains a folder.

Wonder if it’s been logged as a bug / fixed in Leopard?

By: Sho

Sho — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 18:55:24 +0000

Both accounts have admin access. The problem is that since the time I initially set up my machine, I changed my mind about which account was going to be the admin account.

In any case, I maintain that allowing users to set the owner on applications without setting the owner of the package contents or at least giving some visibility to what is going on qualifies as a usability bug.

By: Eunix

Eunix — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 17:56:38 +0000

So… why not install the Flash player update under the same account with which you installed it the first time? This just seems unnecessarily complex.

Apple (and every other *nix-based OS distributor) advises people to install apps under an administrative account for a reason, and this is it: Changing file ownership and permissions like this will only cause problems later when you try to update something else under the other account. Was Firefox installed for all users? Or do both accounts have administrative access?