Betalogue

I am an old-school Mac user. This means, among other things, that I learned how to use a mouse at a time when the only way to pull down a menu on the Mac was to click and hold, and then, while holding the mouse button, drag the mouse pointer down the menu to the desired item and release the mouse button to select it.

Of course, since then, the Mac has heartily embraced the other way to pull down a menu, which is to do a simple click on the menu heading, releasing the mouse button immediately, and then move the mouse pointer down and do a second simple click on the desired menu item to select it.

But that does not mean that the old way of doing things no longer works. For all pull-down menu controls, Mac OS X still lets you do either way. And so, like many other old-fashioned Mac users probably, I tend to use both methods all the time, without even being aware of it.

I definitely become aware of it, however, when one of the two methods ceases to work, which is the case with the “Repeat Alert” control in iCal 5 (under Lion):

This is the message window that appears when you configure an iCal event to have an alert that displays a message at some point to remind you of the event. The small middle button is a control that normally displays a contextual menu with a list of options to repeat the alert later:

This works fine if you do a simple click on the control. But if you click and hold the mouse button down, you get this:

I am tempted to write a snarky remark about the fact that this is the type of thing that tends to happen when your engineers spend too much time focusing on absurd and ill-advised skeuomorphic designs, but… I don’t want that leatherette Lion to start growling at me, so I won’t say anything.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011 at 9:52 am and is filed under Macintosh. 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.