DISQUS

Jonathan Brazil · 2 years ago

It's been there a while; not too sure how long though but it's definitely part of Tiger. Great feature though if for no other reason than stopping you from clicking on a file that hasn't yet finished downloading.

Shog9 · 2 years ago

Hey, now *that's* cool. A non-superfluous shell integration... what a novel idea!

Arbitrary OT question of the day (and i know you're not a Mac developer as such, but there's something i've been curious about...): You know how in Windows, it's possible (but decidedly non-trivial) to integrate the shell into your app such that "objects" in the program (images, email attachments, bits of string, whatever) can easily become objects in the filesystem (or at least, the shell's view of the filesystem) with all the comfort that entails (copy/paste, drag/drop, passing off arbitrary operations to 3rd-party programs or extensions, etc.)... well, does that exist on the Mac? And, does it suck less? I realize i'm building a lot of ambiguity into this question, what with "the shell" in Mac-land and Win-land being two relatively different concepts... perhaps a concrete example would be easier: someone sends me an email with an mp3-in-a-rarfile attachment - do i have to export this to some filesystem location, open it up in my rar-decompressing app of choice, dump the mp3 to some filesystem location *again*, and then open it up in my music-playing-application-of-choice... or can i rely on both my email proggy, rar-proggy, and musics-playing-proggy to understand each other well enough to turn this into a two-click-to-listen operation? And if the latter, does that depend on some specific use of Apple-created software email, decompression, and music... or is it available across the board, a basic understanding among Mac-targeted software that *this is how things work*? Whatabout if my email proggy is GMail and i like to use a different music player for each day of the week?

Paul Watson · 2 years ago

To answer your specific example; no. Sadly, you have to unzip the archive in your mail app and then load the unzipped file into your music player. None of the Mac mail apps I have used inspect the contents of a zip and provide extra functionality.

There is a built-in unzipper though in Mac OS X. Works well enough. And there does seem to be a common understanding amongst Mac OS X apps to use common formats for zipping/archiving. I haven't yet had the "Ah shit, it is a RAR file, now I have to download RAR." moment on Mac OS X. Though of course if someone sent me a RAR, I'd have to download RAR.