[FoRK] Should Exist: Save Box Rules

[Kevin Elliott]

On Jan 9, 2008, at 11:07 AM, Stephen D. Williams wrote:

> I am buying a Mac Pro desktop partly to play with Automator and  
> other desktop innovations that MS is too stupid and non-user- 
> oriented to add and the Unix/Linux guys are just not well funded and  
> organized to do. Apple just changed the Mac Pro desktop  
> configurations yesterday, just in time. I can get an educational  
> discount, being a student!. Are there other discounts to be had on a  
> custom system? I'm buying RAM and HD space over the baseline on the  
> open market.

If your willing to drop some serious money (~$500), then you can get a  
select developer membership, which includes access to OS seeds and  
such.  It also includes a number of hardware discounts (basically  
coupons), and this discount is fairly substantial, especially on the  
Pro hardware.  Of course you won't save anything unless your buying  
more than one computer and/or want to take advantage of some of the  
other perks.  Otherwise the education price is normally the most  
aggressive discount.

> I have a number of my own ideas that I desperately want implemented,  
> somewhere, that might be able to be layered on a system with enough  
> hooks.

The hooks they are legion... are you thinking in terms of UI level  
stuff, or deeper?

> I've commented at length somewhere about my desires for sane open /  
> close file dialog boxes. We are still in the freaking dark ages  
> here. I constantly want a variety of features like stickiness, auto- 
> folder suggestion, favorite folders (which Gnome has!), etc. It  
> absolutely should be a plugin system that is scriptable, etc.

It is possible to replace/alter the open/save dialogs pretty much to  
any degree.  The techniques are pretty hacky, but basically stable if  
done properly.   One vendor in the game:
<http://www.stclairsw.com/DefaultFolderX/features.html>