Comments on: Two UI “Features” I Just Don’t Understand

By: Citizen Z

Citizen Z — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 01:21:13 +0000

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.

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 10:22:04 +0000

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.

By: levi_h

levi_h — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 05:58:24 +0000

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.

By: stevex

stevex — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 04:27:59 +0000

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.

By: surkh

surkh — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 01:15:20 +0000

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.

By: Jake

Jake — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 00:44:00 +0000

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.

By: Sam McDonald

Sam McDonald — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 17:53:58 +0000

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.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 15:58:48 +0000

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!