Talk:.DS Store

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[edit] Desktop Services

This was added recently:

The name of the files stands for "Desktop Services Store". Although they were initially primarily used by the Finder they were envisioned as a more general purpose store of metadata about the display options of folders such as icon position and view settings.

Can anyone provide a source to back any of this up? Searching apple.com for "Desktop Services Store" provides zero results. Searching for "Desktop Services" and "DS_Store" provides a single result, which is a posting to the applescript-users mailing list. I'm not sure if that qualifies as a "reliable source". I think the guy who wrote the posting used to be an Apple employee but pre-Mac OS X. AlistairMcMillan 01:31, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

I added the entry above. I was the technical lead for the Mac OS X Finder when it was first written. Part of the work we did when re-architecting from its previous Mac OS 9 incarnation was to separate its user interface from its back-end. The back-end part is what does file enumeration, watch for changes in the file system, deals with metadata, including this like icon locations and folder settings. Internally, those two components were known as Finder_FE and Finder_BE (Frontend and Backend). However, we started realizing that the backend would be useful outside of the Finder. Therefore, a plan was hatched to someday make it available as a public API. Since I had previously been responsible for naming Icon Services and Navigation Services, we decided to go with Desktop Services (at the time, we were also considering renaming the Finder to "Desktop"). Hence the name of the DS_Store. Personally, I don't think it's a great and I wish we had gone with something a bit more descriptive, but it's too late for that :-) Incidentally, Finder_BE aka Desktop Services did end up being used by more than just the Finder: Navigation Services (the Open/Save dialog) now also make use of it (although it didn't in the initial release of Mac OS). However, that API has still not been released, so, officially, there is no Desktop Services yet. ArnoGourdol 20:32, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Cool. Thanks for the reply. Do you know if this information has been published anywhere? Somewhere that I could use as a citation in the article? Even if you just wrote about this in your blog, that could be cited as a source. AlistairMcMillan 23:01, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Done: http://arno.org/blog/2006/09/on-origins-of-dsstore.html ArnoGourdol 00:58, 1 October 2006 (UTC)