[X Newbies] Desktop Problems

[Steven Rogers]

On Apr 9, 2004, at 3:10 PM, Charles Martin wrote:

> Here's the root of the problem: there is an invisible grid in Mac OS X 
> that the icons align to when you select "clean up" or "snap to grid." 
> This grid is set very wide to accomodate those large lovely icons, but 
> for those of us more comfortable with smaller icons (mine are 40x40, 
> slightly larger than the OS 9 icons), it's annoying.
>
> There is (imho) a bug in this design because the grid freaks out if 
> you MANUALLY place an item too close to another item that is REQUIRED 
> to be on the grid (like drives, CD icons, removable drives etc). . . .

I would agree that there's something funny about the grid. Aside from 
it putting the icons annoyingly far apart, the grid also seems to shift 
around in some folders. I've noticed that I can "clean up" or otherwise 
align the items in a folder to the grid (I occasionally sort my 
Applications folder by name) and then later drop a new item into the 
folder that won't line up with the items that are already there. In 
fact, *every* item in the folder is perfectly aligned, but not aligned 
with the grid anymore.  Then when you drop in a new item or move an 
existing one, that's when the random shuffling happens.

Its a deeper problem than just having two items that are two close 
together. I suspect the bug has something to do with the way the finder 
keeps track of where the "origin" is in a folder. Generally, the grid 
seems to creep up. Sometimes you can induce this behavior manually by 
turning on the "snap to grid" option and moving icons on the top row up 
just a bit. Usually, they'll either fall back to the current row, or 
establish a new properly spaced row above the current row. But 
occasionally, they will hop up an incremental amount and <zing>, the 
whole grid is shifted. That's what sets off the random shuffling.

A strange trick I've found that seems to help (at least temporarily) is 
to open the folder afflicted with "hopping syndrome" and try moving the 
icons a half-row up from the top row until you can no longer get the 
grid to shift. Each time the grid shifts, re-align all the items in the 
folder, and then start moving again. Eventually, the grid won't shift.  
It seems to afflict some folders, but not others. It happens to my 
Applications folder often, and some sub-folders of my documents folder. 
But many other folders behave perfectly normally.

SR