On my Mac PowerBook I have a folder called Downloads where my web browser (Safari) dumps everything that it downloads. Every RealAudio stream, every PDF, every software installer…. Right now there’s about 2.2GB of stuff in there.
This morning, I thought about cleaning up my disk, opened Downloads, and typed Cmd-A to select all of the items, so that I’d get a count at the bottom of the window. 314 items. Wow. Too much to tidy right now, I’ll do it later… oh look, there’s that PDF I was reviewing… let’s take another look…”
What I intended to do was click the PDF, thereby deselecting everything else, and then double-click it to launch Acrobat. What I actually did was to double-click it. And, obediently, Finder started opening all of the selected items – all 314 of them. Finder windows popped up, disk images started mounting, audio streams started playing, all sorts of applications started running. And of course this left no cycles to respond to UI events. So I did the only reasonable thing. I power-cycled.
Maybe the Finder needs to be a little less literal-minded.