Real Silly
Why does Mac RealOne Player — and for that matter Mac Windows Media Player — leave behind an icon every time I play a media clip? There’s no real reason for it. It never happened on Windows, and I never found myself wishing, “Oh why can’t RealOne Player download a shortcut of every media clip I play with it?” It would be like my Web browser leaving behind an icon for every page it downloaded. (Wow, that would be a lot of icons.) Okay, it’s not quite that bad, but it’s still real silly.
Go back to the top of this entry ↑
Comments
I always hated that too.
Mike on 28 Nov 03
Windows does leave behind an icon, its just in a temp directory. Mac, by default is upfront about its downloads (in this case they are little snippets that trigger the streaming media to start playing. This file is required to start-up the application or connect tha application with this file (associated by file type and noticible to us by the iconographic symbol).
I quickly pushed all my *Downloads* into a folder labled as such that resides on my Mac’s desktop. This kept the clutter off my desktop, but gave me easy access to everything downloaded.
The Windows variant bugged me as it was like sweeping the dirt under the rug and rarely getting cleaned out properly. I like the Mac variant more as it is upfront with the user about the mess and allows the user to clean it up or move it to their own place under the rug.
vanderwal on 28 Nov 03
This file is required to start-up the application or connect tha application with this file…
Okay, so it needs be downloaded, but so do web pages. I still don’t see why it’s downloaded to my downloads location as if it’s something I want to keep. Like I said, my Web browser doesn’t leave any sort of trail, why should any other application? It seems to be more of a consistency issue than a Mac vs. Windows issue.
Joshua on 28 Nov 03
I rather like the treating non-Web pages differently. Many folks will save a PDF to their document storage portion of their hard drive, but the problem is that document is already stored on the hard drive. Streaming audio and video is similar, in that I can save a link (or the whole of a Quicktime movie) to a place on my hard drive so that I can catalog and reuse that information in the future, should I want to. I also have the option of nuking the unuseful deposited bytes into oblivion.
vanderwal on 1 Dec 03
At the moment, Safari lacks preferences for what you want opening your files and such. As a result, it just downloads unrecognized files and launches them. It is, however, quite smart about zips, sits, dmgs, and others, but that functionality is hard-coded.
I wish Safari would allow me to just tell it what to open things with without putting a permanent file on my desktop. I’d like it to treat such media in the same way it treats cache. Maybe such a feature will come.
By the way, even with this feature, you’d still be able to download the file to you downloads folder by right/control-clicking the link and clicking “Download Link to Disk”.
Dris on 5 Dec 03
You can choose where Safari downloads to in the General preferences. You can also choose to have the downloads delete manually, when Safari quits, or upon successful download. Safari also give the option to open safe files (the default setting) or not. All these are on the first screen of the preferences.
vanderwal on 7 Dec 03