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Rebel Scum: More Attacks on 'Expected Behaviour'

There's something astir in the Empire.

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There's something astir in the Empire. Third party vendors quietly defy Cupertino and help protect OS X users from what Apple officially consider 'expected behaviour'. The Force is strong in some of these insurgents - this rebellion must be crushed before it gets out of hand.

Following a number of alarming reports at MacInTouch and Mac OS X Hints Rixstep published a study of - and comments on - the issues on 20 December 2006. Rixstep and a number of other ISVs also submitted bug reports to Apple.

Apple responded with the following.

Engineering has determined that this issue behaves as intended based on the following information: When the Save panel asks if you want to replace a file or folder of the same name, and the Replace button is clicked, expected behavior is received.

The following was noted in previous articles - along with evidence of initial sightings of rebel activity with classic 'MacOS' and MS Office.

Unix won't allow this nonsense.
Classic 'MacOS' won't allow it either.
MS Office for OS X won't allow it either.
Standard Linux GUIs won't allow it either.
Heck most likely even Windows won't allow it!
No one allows it - except... And they haven't always allowed it either.
But Apple do allow it today and further claim it's 'expected behaviour'.
Allowing files to overwrite folders is not, has never been, and will never be 'expected behaviour'. It's batshit insane.
But Apple's response to this issue and to user concerns in general is very much 'expected behaviour'. From Apple that is.

But there are other outposts of insurrection in the galaxy. According to reports (and the screenshot below) TextMate at least asks for (an otherwise unnecessary) authentication before doing something so stupid - an action that is clearly in defiance of Apple usability guidelines.

Likewise Rich Siegel's Text Wrangler - who would have thought Rich Siegel so disrespectful?

Clearly something must be done. If Apple cannot get these upstarts to fall in line, people will sooner or later assume this type of protection against overwriting directory trees with ordinary files is 'expected behaviour' - and then what will the world of OS X come to?

Thanks to Bruner, Nick, and all the rest at the forum for sweating the details again.