<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><br><div><div>On Feb 10, 2009, at 6:46 AM, Benjamin Ducke wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Mac Programmer wrote:</div> <blockquote type="cite"><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Unmac-ish behavior:</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">- Non-native dialogs.</div> </blockquote><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Which ones? All of them or just the file dialogs?</div></blockquote><div><br></div>Yes, the standard file dialogs like Open.</div><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div> <blockquote type="cite"><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">- Open dialog doesn't show other mounted volumes.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">- ~/.qgis <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>This is a goofy Linux trick that unfortunately Finder honors, meaning it's difficult to browse your plugins with Finder unless you know the trick of entering ~/.qgis in Finder's Go | Go to folder. Why not put the plugins in ~/Library somewhere, maybe under Preferences or Plug-ins or something?</div> </blockquote><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Rather a Unix standard than a goofy trick, perhaps? Meaning: this is</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">what works just fine for perhaps a majority of the developers and users</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">on this list. I do agree though, that it would make sense to stick more</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">closely to Mac OS X conventions for that particular environment.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">How about you put some work into fine-tuning the Mac OS X version?</div></blockquote><div><br></div>A few apps that have been rudely ported to Mac, such as Gimp and Mono, do use a "." file or folder, but this is not the way truly native Mac apps do it. I see that QGIS does use ~/Library/Preferences for its .plist preferences file, so that's good to see.</div><div><br></div><div>I'm still evaluating QGIS and trying to figure out whether I belong here. Right now all I can do is report issues that I've encountered.<br><br><blockquote type="cite"> <blockquote type="cite"><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">- Case-sensitive list in Plugin Manager. Only in some weird Unix world would I think to look for fTools at the bottom of an alphabetical list. OS X file system is case insensitive. Lists should be too.</div> </blockquote><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Well, you did find it. So the system works. And for some reason it seems</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">to make sense to a lot of people, including myself.</div></blockquote><div><br></div>Let's test that assumption. You go into a bookstore to buy a book of poems by ee cummings. You can't find him in the "C" section and give up. Unbeknownst to you they had filed his books after "Z".<br><br><blockquote type="cite"> <blockquote type="cite"><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">- Too many Linux assumptions. See page 42 in user guide:</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Your action text now looks like this: <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>firefox <a href="http://google.com/search?q=%NAMES">http://google.com/search?q=%NAMES</a></div> </blockquote><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">In this case, rather an assumption that includes Linux and Windows and</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">pretty much any other OS QGIS runs on except Mac OS X. It is true</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">though, that the user guide needs to cover OS-specific details.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I suppose we simply don't have enough active Mac users around to</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">contribute all of those, so feel free to chip in.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div> <blockquote type="cite"><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Wrong. On OS X, Firefox is an app bundle (folder) named Firefox.app which will not be in the path. Even if it were, this is the wrong way to launch any app with OS X. Instead, enter something like this:</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">open "<a href="http://google.com/search?q=%NAME">http://google.com/search?q=%NAME</a>"</div> </blockquote><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Which means that you will no longer be able to exchange a QGIS project</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">that includes "action links" in an attribute table with users on other</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">systems. This may actually be a tough problem and needs some thought.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Just going the Mac way because it is presumably better is certainly</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">not the answer.</div></blockquote><div><br></div>I don't think the example works on Windows either. Even if Firefox is installed, it won't normally be on the path, so something like this would be necessary:</div><div><br></div><div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" "<a href="http://google.com/search?q=%NAME">http://google.com/search?q=%NAME</a>"</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Note that QGIS 1.0 crashes if given anything invalid, so the quotes are required, as is the presence of Firefox in the C:\Program Files folder.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Actually, to shell to an external application, Linux is kind of the odd man out. With both Windows and OS X, you just shell to the document file and the OS launches the application that's associated with that file. With Windows, all files with a given extension map to a single application, so it's not perfect, but on Mac individual files can be associated with different apps, thus overriding the extension-based default app. Not sure why this doesn't work with QGIS on Windows - that is, if using the Win API ShellExecute function, only the URL would be needed and Windows will launch your default browser to open the URL. For some reason that doesn't work with QGIS. Maybe somebody could review how external apps are launched - maybe the assumption is that an app will always be specified, which makes sense on Linux but not on Windows or OS X.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Thanks.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">-Phil</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br></div></div></div><br></body></html>