Thanks again.

http://www.learningosx.com/2008/06/where-do-my-downloads-go/

The dialog box you are talking about is just a download history in Safari, that shows you what you have downloaded in the past. You can click on the small magnifying glass icon and it will also take you right to the file you downloaded, assuming it still exists and you have not deleted it.

Any item in the Dock is not a real file, but an “alias” of sorts. So while Leopard comes with a folder that is “Downloads” it is nothing more than a “shortcut” or “Alias” to the real downloads folder in your home folder.

Same for anything in the dock, which is why you can remove anything from the Dock and it is not destructive.

Hope that helps.

I wan’t to emphasize the “small chance” of “loosing sync” you pointed out. For file copies off of a mounted drive, in the case of Mac OS X, if the file copy dialogue is no longer on your screen, the files in fact were moved.

I am not 100% sure, but on a copy onto, the same should apply.

This is in direct contrast to Windows, where a file copy can continue, even after the file copy dialogue is gone, and long gone, as in seconds after, the files are still catching up. This has been the case since XP, and up to Vista, though both are marginally different at how they approach it.

The main reason the OS is “scolding”, at least in my guess, is the overhead to watch the removable media, and see if it is in fact in use during a file operation is high. Easier to just alert the user to a best practice case, and not have to run a background process that will watch all removable media.

in closing, remember as Morgan states, it is a “small chance”, OS X is robust enough to know that at any time, a power failure, battery failure, or stray cat can cause your computer to shut down.

Firewire is the only one I am really careful with, as you can in fact fry the firewire bus under certain also rare cases by skipping the unmount.

Then again, I do find myself downloading things many times over, and your method could save some people some time, just make sure you are still using the most current version.

When you eject a disk image or physical device such as a thumb drive or external hard drive, you are ensuring that any remaining changes made to the files and other information on that device gets updated before you pull it out of the port. Mac OS X is based on BSD, which, like other Unix derivatives, will cache any changes in RAM before committing them to the physical device. This speeds up transfers for the end user, but the downside is that the changes aren’t final until the drive is ejected. This means that if you don’t eject before removing the hardware, there’s a small chance you may “lose sync” with the data still in RAM and could end up with corrupted files. By ejecting every time, you are ensuring that your data is not corrupted.

I may be wrong, but I believe that the reason you probably never had an issue with it on a PC is because you can tell the OS not to warn you about such things. Also, Windows does handle such caching a bit differently; given sufficient time the data in RAM will sync with the device in a background process, making an eject command unnecessary most of the time.

P.S.: Scott, sorry if I stepped on your toes here but I figured I’d throw in the answer since I was here. No offense intended.

I find with all new Mac users, they tend to mount the DMGs and run applications directly from them (unless there are visible instructions to do otherwise, which some developers are kind enough to include).

On top of that, they never trash any of the DMG or ZIP files.

I have high hopes that Apple will sometime address this major confusion point for new users.