Trying to get my head straight about what it means to modify a file and what it means to modify a folder for a desktop operating system. Mac OS X’s behaviour feels intuitively wrong, but turns out it is much harder than I expected to nail down exactly why it is wrong.

In general the implementation of filesystem metadata on OS X has been two steps back with respect to the old Mac OS ways. (The one step forward has been the rich metadata provided by the Finder in terms of previews, performance on folders with hundreds of files, and the exposing of file content metadata with the interface for finding files.)

I feel that Mac OS X is shifting away from the concept of files existing on a filesystem without providing a suitable alternative.