I’m tempted for my bug this week to be “Hey, I entered a bug last week through the public form but still haven’t got my bug tracking number!”, but I guess I’ll give them a bit longer (and I’ve fixed my ADC account, so it shouldn’t be a problem this time).

Anyway, my bug for this week is a UI one I don’t seriously expect to see solved any time soon but happened to annoy me earlier this week.

Screen-shot of the can't eject disk because it's in use dialog box

You can probably already see where I’m going.

Specifically, the other night, I wanted to move my powerbook, which meant unplugging my firewire hard disk. Being the good little camper that I am, I tried to eject it first, and was presented with that dialog. Even after quitting everything in the dock that dialog still wouldn’t let me eject it, so something odd was going on, but that’s not my point. There needs to be a simple explanation for the end user as to exactly what is causing the disk to be busy. Ideally, there should be a simple review process while the system automatically closes each application and file which was in use.

For what it’s worth, if you’re comfortable with the terminal, you can run ‘lsof | grep ‘ and get a good idea of what’s keeping the disk busy, but an end user is unlikely to do that.

I’m not sure how it’s useful to anyone else (outside apple at least), but the problem ID is 4250367.