Comments on: Cocoa’s Broken Proxy Icons

By: More Broken Proxy Icons | NSLog();

More Broken Proxy Icons | NSLog(); — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:28:48 +0000

[...] everywhere, I know. I wrote about some earlier ones here and today I discovered a new case in [...]

By: ansemond.com » Blog Archive » Neat Mac tricks

ansemond.com » Blog Archive » Neat Mac tricks — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 16:31:37 +0000

[...] The little icon in the titlebar of many applications is a “Proxy Icon” and can be dragged around just like the document’s icon can be… except it doesn’t always work. [...]

By: Erik J. Barzeski

Erik J. Barzeski — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 16:42:05 +0000

And today it was refiled under the original bug report, #3580490.

By: Erik J. Barzeski

Erik J. Barzeski — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 21:09:48 +0000

Apple replied to my radar bug report to ask for my System Profiler report. Because, yeah, that's relevant. Not!

By: Paul D

Paul D — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 07:39:40 +0000

This annoys me all the time. I constantly use the proxy icon when working with documents, and I could never figure out why a few apps (like Preview) refused to let me move or delete the file I was viewing.

By: Chris T

Chris T — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 01:02:24 +0000

I hope everyone complaining about this is also filing bugs in bugreporter.apple.com about it...

Andrew: nobody could figure out a way to make a workable UI for saving from the proxy icon. They actually user-tested (yes, back when Apple still had a nominal UI team) several different ways of doing it, and always confused a nontrivial number of people. For Mac OS 8.5, when the Mac Toolbox team pushed to get the feature in, the UI designer took the pragmatic route of simply disabling the proxy icon until the user saved the file.

This was one of the reasons -- not the only one, though -- it took so long to get proxy icons into the system software. (There was a MacHack demo of proxy icons circa 1992/1993. Mac OS 8.5 came out circa 1998.)

By: scrolly

scrolly — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 22:07:24 +0000

This reminds me of "untitled" vs "Untitled". Apple says one thing and does another.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 15:26:52 +0000

Why do Apple insist on the "Once a window has a proxy icon..."? Is there any reason not to allow the proxy icon to be used to save the document?

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 07:44:58 +0000

I agree...not only is the alias behavior useless, it's also confusing if you're a new user. If it's an icon, it should behave as I'd expect. The only thing I really use proxy icons for, is I can command-click it and go to the parent folder in the Finder, and then type command-delete to move it to the trash. Would be nice to save a couple steps. A little off-topic, but why does Apple seem to be abandoning the HIG? I'm not a developer, but as a user, I really like the consistency and intuitiveness employed on the Mac. Isn't that made possible by the HIG?

By: PatrickQG

PatrickQG — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 06:31:29 +0000

I've noticed that dragging a proxy icon to the trash results in, well, nothing happening. Never actually used it beyond once, so never cared to work out what apps it worked in.

As to it creating aliases, the main way I use it is to drag things from a text editor to, say, CyberDuck, where it works exactly as I'd expect.