Curious. As a rule, I don’t use Sorter at all. But, I played with this in PB7 on 10.6.2.
The blue ball just means the file is unread. Click/read the document and the normal thumbnail/icon appears. Nothing unusual here.
Files locked via Finder then added to DT via Sorter are not locked. It’s a copy; perhaps one would expect it not to be locked.
Files dragged into a database (not via Sorter) are locked.
CMD-OPT-drag into Sorter is supposed to make an indexed file (per manual) but moves it. (I think this is an earlier reported issue.)
For all my tests, I used the same sample RTF file. After playing for a while, and deleting/emptying the trash between each experiment, DT started making a duplicate of my sample file. Actually, two duplicates. One had the same file name, the other had the file name with a suffix: “09-53-33-273”. I have no idea what those numbers represent (not the time and/or date). I’m guessing this has something to do with the deleted files being in the OS X trash; the trash process might be assigning those odd suffixes.
And the default operation is to copy the dropped file, this can be changed by using key modifiers just like in the Finder. For any and all files that are dropped into the Sorter, we explicitly try to unlock and make them writable. If this fails, you’ll see a warning message.
