Panther’s Mail: Nice little touch

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
December 15th, 2003 • 5:14 am

In spite of all its imperfections, there are nice little touches in Mail that show that at least some thought has actually gone into usability issues.

For example, I was browsing a discussion thread this morning. I am already familiar with the ability to collapse/expand a thread by using the left and right cursor keys.

What I didn’t realize is that you can do so no matter which message in the thread is currently selected. In other words, when the thread is expanded, if you select any message in the thread and hit the left cursor key, the whole thread collapses.

Initially, I thought you had to highlight the “header message” for the entire thread first before hitting the left key. This is, of course, much more convenient and intuitive.

A user-hostile software developer would have restricted the collapse/expand behaviour to the header message. Nice to see that the Apple developer who developed this particular feature thought about it as a Mail user would and not as a software developer would.


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