Betalogue

It’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder, “What were they thinking?”

Since I upgraded to Snow Leopard, I have noticed, on more than one occasion, that when I attempted to drag a selected message in Mail’s message list in order to file it in a specific mailbox, instead of responding to my mouse movement by actually dragging the selected message, Mail would for some reason interpret my gesture as meaning that I wanted to extend my selection of messages by adding more contiguous messages to the current selection.

This never used to happen in Mail prior to version 4.x (i.e. the Snow Leopard version). It was quite irritating.

Today, I did more testing and was able to determine that, apparently, Apple has introduced a new behaviour where the meaning of clicking and dragging in Mail’s message list changes depending on the initial direction of the dragging.

If the dragging is more or less vertical, then Mail interprets it as meaning that the user wants to create a contiguous selection of several mail messages.

If the dragging is horizontal, then Mail interprets it as meaning that the user wants to drag the selected message(s) to a destination in the mailbox drawer on the left.

Of course, since my mailbox drawer contains a fairly long list of mailboxes that extends all the way to the bottom of it, it happens quite often that, when I click and drag on a message in the message list near the top of the list in order to file it in a mailbox somewhere near the bottom of the mailbox drawer, my dragging movement is, at least initially, more or less vertical.

Now, with this new behaviour introduced by Apple’s engineers in Snow Leopard, I am forced to try and remember that, when I want to drag a message or a bunch of messages to my mailbox drawer, I need to make sure that the dragging movement immediately after my clicking is more or less horizontal.

This is ridiculous. Did Apple actually test this in the real world? Don’t they have big 30″ screens with mailbox drawers that contain long lists of nested mailboxes? Can’t they see that it happens far too often that the user starts with a vertical drag even when what he means to do is to drag something to the left towards the mailbox drawer?

What pisses me off even more is that we went through exactly the same idiotic direction-dependent discrimination with draggable tabs in Safari 3.

And finally in Safari 4 Apple fixed this and switched back to a behaviour that is the always same regardless of the initial direction of the dragging movement.

I suppose this means that we are going to have to live with this stupid direction-dependent behaviour until the next major revision of Mail (i.e. of Mac OS X), when enough Mail users have complained that this was a stupid idea to begin with.

Couldn’t the Mail guys have talked to the Safari guys to inquire about how well the direction-dependent behaviour in Safari 3 was received and why they switched back to a direction-independent behaviour in Safari 4?

Besides, what other Apple application is there that exhibits the same behaviour as Mail 4.x?

iTunes 9? Nope. If you want to extend a selection vertically in list view, you have to you shift-click. You can click-and-drag on an item in the list in any direction to add it to a playlist in the source list on the left-hand side.

Finder? Nope. If you want to extend a selection vertically in list view or column view, you have to use shift-click. You can click-and-drag on an item in the list in any direction to add it to the side bar on the left-hand side.

What kind of planet do the Mail 4.x guys live on?

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Thursday, September 24th, 2009 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Mail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.