[lookmark]

I'm a designer, so I appreciate any feedback on this issue from programmers and developers.

There's an "in use" event in OS X that occurs frequently with this user (and bugs me to no end).

If you have a file open from another drive and try to dismount or eject that drive, you'll be treated to a dialog with a little warning sign that says "This drive cannot be ejected because a file is in use."

Why can't the dialog tell you which files are in use? Or (even better) give the user the option of closing these files, then ejecting/dismounting the drive for you?

Instead of, say, requiring the user to hunt through (and, with increasing frustration, quit) all open apps, looking for the mysteriously "used" files...

I'm curious: is difficult from a programming viewpoint, or just poor interface on Apple's part?

Seems to me like Apple can do much better.

[yeslekmc]

I have had problems specifically with Classic applications doing this. Everything looks fine and clear to OS X, but some rouge application in classic has a lock on a CD that will keep it from being ejected. It can be quite annoying. I'm not sure if it's a bug on Apple's part or poor coding from some legacy classic application.

[Gul Banana]

I have something worse - the files in use are not even closable
I have an iBook and a tower, which I connect together on a network. If I mount one of the tower's hard drives, open it, copy a file to my desktop, and close the window again, you'd think that I don't hav e anything open on the remote drive, right? Wrong. I don't know what the file is, but I have to kill the finder itself before I can dismount the drive. Next time it happens I'll use lsof...