everything downloads in a little heap

[Macette]

everytime i download something from the internet, or drag-and-drop an attachment out of my email, it all piles up in the bottom right corner of my desktop, everything on top of each other, which is very annoying. is this happening to anyone else? it doesn't happen when i have 'keep arranged by...' (date, name etc), but I HATE having that option on, because i like things to land where i put them.

this is new in panther.. it never happened before. i'm running a dual 2ghz G5.

 

[Makosuke]

Do you already have a lot of items on your desktop? I know on my machines if the desktop is already "full" (the OS's implied definition, not mine), anything added to the desktop will pile up in the top right corner. It used to be that when you drug something to the desktop (rather than saved it there) it would land where you dragged it, but that may have changed in Panther.

If your desktop isn't full of stuff, then this isn't normal behavior, and I'm not seeing it on a similar set-up. You could try using Terminal to delete the .DS_Store file on your desktop and see if that resets something, I suppose.

 

[Macette]

thanks - that's a good idea - i will give it a shot. my desktop is not full - there are maybe 15 things on it at the moment, just a couple of columns of little bits and pieces.

 

[bennetsaysargh]

that's happened to me in jaguar. i never found out what it was, but i too would like to know.

 

[Col127]

macette,

did you ever find a solution to your problem? The same thing happens to me in panther!

 

[Macette]

no... but it doesn't seem to happen under 10.3.1 (i haven't really noticed, anyway)

 

[cb911]

couldn't you just cmd+J and set it organize by name or something?

i've noticed that if folders don't have any sort of "order by...." applied to them, all the files just seem to pile up. kind of annoying because you've got to keep going cmd+J and manually setting files to 'organize by name' etc.

 

[Macette]

Originally posted by cb911
couldn't you just cmd+J and set it organize by name or something?

yes, that fixes the problem - but i hate having things arranged by ..., because one of the useful things (for me) about the desktop is having things stay where i put them. if i arrange them by... then they snap into place. annoying.