Two UI “Features” I Just Don’t Understand
One on the Mac, and one on the PC.
First, the Mac. When you’re selecting items in a list by holding down shift and using the arrow keys, pressing the arrow in the opposite direction expands the selection the other way, rather than reducing the selection. Let me illustrate:
Here’s a finder window where I want to select a few files. I start with the first file:
I hit the down arrow a few times to select some more files:
Now still holding down shift, I hit the up arrow.
What I expect to happen is one of the items I expanded the selection onto using the down arrow will be deselected and the selection will shrink. What actually happens is the selection grows at the other end.
This is different from how shift-cursor works everywhere else. In an editor, for example, if you hold down the shift key and move the cursor, the selection extends from the anchor (where you started) to the cursor (where you are now).
So why do some lists in the Mac work this way? I don’t think it’s a bug, so someone thinks this is how it should work, but I can’t come up with a good reason for it. I often shift-cursor-down to select a bunch of files and then realize I went to far and need to back up; I have never hit shift-cursor down and then realized I started at the wrong place.
So that’s my Mac beef. Here’s the Windows one.
When you click the thumb in a scroll bar on Windows and move the mouse, there’s a horizontal range within which you have to stay, or the scroll position snaps back to where you started.
This gets in my way because I click the thumb and start moving the mouse to scroll to read something, and because I’m not watching the cursor, it strays outside the green rectangle. And the scroll position snaps back to the top of the document.
Is this a feature to anyone? Old versions of Windows didn’t do this, so again it seems intentional, but I don’t understand the rationale.
November 28th, 2008 at 10:58 am
I use the win ‘feature’ when I do a comparison between two pictures tiled vertically…
I can get the scroll to the top picture, then hold the thumb slide down to the second picture… moving the mouse to the right snaps up to the first picture, then bringing the mouse back to the left snaps it to the second picture… I can just move the mouse left and right to swap between the two pics….
But that’s just how I have used it :)
Meh!
November 28th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
I think you are 100% right about that being a mac UI bug. As for the Microsoft one, I don’t expect anything too be good. I guess I can see where they are coming from, but you have a great point about it being different from how it works in a text editor. I have to say it hasn’t hurt me too much though, because I never noticed it until you brought it up. Now this is going to start bugging me every time I make a selection.
November 28th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
I use (abuse) the windows version. On webpages (like wikipedia), I sometimes want to read something at the top of the page, but I don’t want to forget my spot.
So I take the scroll bar and move it up to the top and read whatever. To bring myself back, I just move my mouse to the left so it clears that horizontal distance and it brings me back to the place I was reading.
November 28th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
Not sure if it was *the* reasoning behind the change, but for me this behavior is a feature because it provides a quick-n-dirty way of checking out differences between two parts of a page or list, by quickly alternating in-and-out of the scroll thumb’s horizontal position threshold.
November 28th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
It’s interesting to hear that at least in the scroll bar case, a few of you have found use for it as a feature. I wonder if the usefulness you’ve found is the reason it works that way, or if that’s just a side effect.
November 29th, 2008 at 12:58 am
Another Mac one that bites me sometimes is that when you misclick in a menu (e.g. on a separator), it disappears! This is especially annoying when you’re three levels deep. I can’t imagine that that was meant to be a feature.
November 29th, 2008 at 5:22 am
I hate that list selection issue on the Mac, except for the maybe two occasions ever where I’ve actually accidentally forgotten to select an item at the top of the list! I’ve been using OS X since Panther and I’ve noticed that there’s been a gradual erosion of that behaviour – Mail, for example, works as expected in Leopard, as does Address Book – I’m speculating that it may be a Cocoa vs Carbon thing. As an example of another Cocoa app that’s not made by Apple, Unison, Panic’s lovely newsgroups software, seems to now work as expected so I wonder whether they changed something or whether they just inherited the fix from Cocoa.
November 30th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
The Mac bug even mystifies respected commenters on Mac/Apple issues. (For example this piece by John Gruber has more info than you’ll probably ever need on the subject.)
I run into the Windows scrollbar thing often enough to be irritated. It’s easy to get outside the lower right side of the box while scrolling down.