Comment by Waterluvian
2 years ago
DS Store seems so unfortunate. Yes it serves a purpose. Yes you can work around it in various ways. But the reality is that it’s basically proliferated file litter to 99% of people who come across it. It’s uncharacteristically un-Apple in terms of UX polish.
Growing up with both System 7.5 / OSX, and windows machines, the Macs never seemed inclined to make me see extraneous files, filetypes, and other “how the computer works” implementation details. It’s just so odd to my mental model of it all to see this file end up everywhere.
For those who live their whole life within Apple's walls, they will never see .DS_Store files, unless they use the Terminal. Finder (with hidden files shown) doesn't even show them anymore.
It is very ugly when files are shared from a Mac to people on Windows though. I think it gives a bad first impression for anyone who might be thinking of transitioning to the Mac.
They pop up in code repositories too, depending on contents and whether the engineer in question noticed it.
absolutely essential to add a line for .DS_Store in every .gitignore, unfortunately.
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I've banned people before because they couldn't stop themselves from continuously uploading those useless ds files
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> It’s uncharacteristically un-Apple in terms of UX polish.
Apple's polish has always been more about the surface then the internals.
I remember playing around with setting up a Hackintosh, and found all those errors in the system logs --- then realised that an actual working Mac generates much the same (ignorable) errors.
To be fair to Apple here, so does every other operating system. Linux system logs are filled with errors too. In general, keeping the logs of even a moderately complex application "clean" - so that the only errors logged are real errors, in some poorly defined meaning of "real" - is very hard.
For operating systems it must be straight up impossible.
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