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Update 02/22/07: Loweded Wookie was kind enough to reply to this post and provide me with a explanation as to why this issue exists. Apparently, the Finder writes out a file named .DS_Store in each directory that it touches. According to this site, the .DS_Store file serves the following purpose:

The .DS_Store files are created by the Finder during its normal course of operation but they are invisible by default. The Finder will automatically put a .DS_Store file into every folder you have opened. These files are used to save the positions of icons, the size of the respective Finder window, the window’s background, and many more view options. While professional users consider the .DS_Store files to be a design flaw of the Mac OS X Finder, a mechanism like this is necessary when opening Finder windows for exchangeable disk media to give former users of the classic Mac OS the same user experience they had in previous operating system versions. If you don’t like to see the .DS_Store files, replace the Finder by a better file management application

This explains why I am unable to open a file if other files are being copied into the same directory. I really appreciate the fact that Loweded took some time out of his day to research this issue with me. It truly was driving me nuts. I don’t necessarily agree with how OS X does this however, at least now I understand why I received the error mentioned below.

Just today I noticed that OS X doesn’t seem let me open a file that I just copied if there are more files that still need to be copied. For example, I tried to copy ~ 280 Megs worth of videos off of my computer upstairs.

When I tried to open one of the files which was already copied I received the following error:

Am I doing something wrong or has Apple just not figured this one out?

Update 2/19/07: Somebody over at digg didn’t believe me that this was a problem so I decided to try it out again when I got home from work. As you can see from these screenshots it is a problem. When I tried and open an image which already had a thumbnail generated for it, OS X told me it couldn’t access the file. This is driving me nuts. Am I doing something wrong?

For this test I copied six JPEGs:

I then tried to open one of the JPEGs which already had a thumbnail generated for it:

For those of you who don’t know, I recently purchased a MacBook with 2GB of RAM. That’s right, I bought a Mac! In just three short days I’ve already learned a lot about OS X and I am actually starting to feel at home. I’m kind of suprised with how comfortable I already feel considering the fact that prior to this laptop my only experience with a Mac was at the Apple store and through everything I’ve read about OS X.

Here’s what I’ve done thus far with my new MacBook:

• Installed several apps including: Office, AppZapper, Taco HTML, VLC, Software for my printer, Firefox and several other applications. Installing software on the Mac is great. No longer do I have to worry about the Windows registry
• Setup my email and several other applications including iChat so that I can communicate with the rest of the world. iChat is pretty sweet but I’m not sure how much I am actually going to use it.
• Connected my camera and a usb thumb drive just to see how well OS X handles other USB devices. Needless to say it worked like a champ.
• Played around with the entire iLife suite including GarageBand and iDVD. I think I might put together a DVD for Alex’s two year.
• Played around with most of the System preferences
• Got connected up to my network. This was the easiest wireless connection I’ve ever made. In fact, I was able to connect directly to the network during the initial setup once I remembered that I had to add my MacBook’s MAC address to my Linksys router (check out my video).

The only complaint I have thus far is in regards to the lack of a two button mouse. As you can imagine, trying to right click with a one button mouse is kind of difficult. Every once and a while I plug in a good old two button mouse just so I don’t have to screw around with the ctrl key. Anybody know why Apple insists on going with a one button mouse? It just seems like it is extremely inefficient to be using only one button. In any case, here’s a video that I took while I unboxed my MacBook. Stay tuned for more Mac/Apple info. I plan on updating this blog often with more informatio on how the switch is going.