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obscureaccount82 · Apr 23, 2007, 07:39 AM

Hope ignorance isn't punished here, 'cause I've got a pretty simple question.

Dropped something into the trash without realizing it was part of a program that I actually use! How do I get it out of the trash, back onto my desktop? It's still in my sidebar.. but I can't use it.

TETENAL · Apr 23, 2007, 07:58 AM

You click once onto the trash icon in the Dock, a window with the trash-contents opens and you drag whatever you want to recover onto the Desktop.

frdmfghtr · Apr 23, 2007, 11:28 AM

If the item didn't come from the desktop originally, drag it to wherever it came from in the first place.

This would be one of those situations where I think Windows works better; you can restore an deleted item from the Recycle Bin by a right-click and select "restore." The item goes from the Recycle Bin back to its original location.

P · Apr 25, 2007, 07:46 AM

You can in OS X as well - at least you could, back in the OS 9 days, and I think the feature is still around. Not on a Mac right now so I can check. It is called Put Away and is on the File menu, and it moves something back to where it was before the last move. Of course, if it was the last action you can also Undo without even opening the Trash.

dru · Apr 25, 2007, 03:39 PM

Originally Posted by P

You can in OS X as well - at least you could, back in the OS 9 days, and I think the feature is still around. Not on a Mac right now so I can check. It is called Put Away and is on the File menu, and it moves something back to where it was before the last move. Of course, if it was the last action you can also Undo without even opening the Trash.

In NeXT's... err... I mean Apple's infinite wisdom, "Put Away" is long gone.

You have to open the last action you did will be the Undo or that you know where an item came from.

Chuckit · Apr 25, 2007, 03:50 PM

Originally Posted by dru

In NeXT's... err... I mean Apple's infinite wisdom, "Put Away" is long gone.

That's because Put Away was an artifact of how OS 9 worked, and it wasn't really clear to most people what the hell it did.

TETENAL · Apr 25, 2007, 04:03 PM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

That's because Put Away was an artifact of how OS 9 worked, and it wasn't really clear to most people what the hell it did.

I don't think that's the reason because it's gone. If you don't know what Put Away (or whatever it was called) does, you can just ignore it and live a happy life. I think there must have been a technical reason for the omission of this feature.

P · Apr 25, 2007, 04:32 PM

Finicky to implement, I suppose. In System 6 and below, it only worked for returning a file from the Desktop or the Trash. That was because of the way the file system worked - "In Trash" and "On Desktop" were attribute flags that were applied to a file or folder that could still retain its position in the directory tree - only it wasn't shown there. Put Away then only meant to zero that flag and refresh the screen - the background was that Apple hoped that you would pull out all files you were working on onto the Desktop and then Put Them Away when done. Quite ingenious, really - only noone really did that. From System 7 and on, the Trash and the Desktop were reimplemented as invisible folders, and Apple added some sort of background magic to support Put Away. They also overloaded it with "Eject and remove ghost image", and most people thought that this was all it ever did.

In OS 8, Apple finally modified Eject to remove the ghost image by default (and there was much rejoicing) and Put Away was essentially forgotten. When picking features to reimplement on top of the new file system drivers, it was rarely used and hard to implement.

Hal Itosis · 05:26 PM

Originally Posted by P

In OS 8, Apple finally modified Eject to remove the ghost image by default (and there was much rejoicing) and Put Away was essentially forgotten. When picking features to reimplement on top of the new file system drivers, it was rarely used and hard to implement.

Not sure what you mean by "In OS 8, [ . . . ] Put Away was essentially forgotten".

It's there in OS9. (I must be misinterpreting that sentence).
I believe it was implemented as a metadata string containg
the 'path to the item's previous parent folder'. That simple.
[For a selected volume, the behavior was to eject all of that
disk's partitions]

Perhaps during the OSX beta they left it out (just like labels)
to achieve as much speed as OSX could muster. Then, users
complained about the missing labels, and they were restored.

I enjoyed Put Away tremendously in OS9, but I plea guilty of
not complaining about the lack of same in OSX...

Time for a poll?

Chuckit · Apr 25, 2007, 05:34 PM

Originally Posted by TETENAL

I don't think that's the reason because it's gone. If you don't know what Put Away (or whatever it was called) does, you can just ignore it and live a happy life. I think there must have been a technical reason for the omission of this feature.

As I said, there was a technical reason for its inclusion in the first place. It was an artifact of how the old Mac OS represented the desktop and trash internally. And since few people even knew what it was, I don't think Apple saw value in reimplementing it now that the technical reasons for its inclusion had disappeared.

P · Apr 26, 2007, 08:56 AM

Originally Posted by Hal Itosis

Not sure what you mean by "In OS 8, [ . . . ] Put Away was essentially forgotten".

I mean that by overloading the "Eject and remove the ghost" feature onto the old Put Away-feature, many weren't aware of the other thing Put Away did. By changing Eject to the sane behavior in OS 8, it essentially replaced Put Away.

Put Away really only makes sense for the Desktop and Trash. It wouldn't be that hard to implement for just those two (a hidden file in each of those directories listing each file in them as well as the last position it had, for instance) but every feature implemented requires testing and QA time, and those are also limited resources.