iCal UI: Pretty bad, and pretty buggy

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
May 30th, 2003 • 12:53 am

I really don’t like the iCal UI much. It uses non-standard behaviors and controls that I just can’t get used to and requires much more trial-and-error clicking and dragging than it should.

Then on top of this, it suffers from obvious bugs that should have been fixed long ago.

For example, you click and drag on a time slot to create an event. The trouble is that you didn’t click exactly in the right spot, so that your event, which starts at 8:00 am, is actually recorded by iCal as starting at 8:15.

So you want to either press cmd-I or choose “Inspector” in the Window menu to correct this. You go to the “at” field on the “from” line, and click on tab to go from the hours setting to the minutes setting. You type “00” instead of “15” and press tab to get out of the field.

Now you’d think that this would be enough for iCal to register the change you just made, right? After all, it’s standard behavior in a non-modal situation such as the Inspector window to record changes on the fly, just like a database tool would do. There is no “OK” or “Save” button to click on to save the changes. They are supposed to be saved automatically by iCal as you go along.

However, if, after doing what I just described, you click on the “Alarm” tab to create an alarm for this event, if you switch back to the “Info” tab, you will see that the time for the event is… 8:15!

Bad. Really bad.

[This item was submitted to Apple through the Bug Reporter page.]


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