Panther’s Finder: Window and dialog box position
Posted by Pierre Igot in: MacintoshJanuary 4th, 2004 • 11:34 pm
It’s a small, yet significant detail, which is especially noticeable on large screens such as mine.
If you go to the Finder, select a file, and hit cmd-I to get the File Information window on that file, the File Information window opens in the top-left corner of your screen, regardless of where the window containing the selected file is.
Then if you go to the “Open With” section, choose a different application, and click on the “Change All…” button, the Finder displays a dialog box asking for confirmation right in the middle of your screen. In my case, the middle of the screen is several hundred pixels away from the top-left corner where the File Information window is located.
If I am using the mouse for all of this, that’s a lot of going back and forth between the left side of the screen and the center of the screen.
Yes, I can use the keyboard to dismiss the confirmation dialog instead of the mouse, but that doesn’t solve the problem, since I still have to move my hands from the mouse to the keyboard and back.
As I said, it’s a small detail, but it seems to me that Mac OS X could be a bit more clever about dialog box positioning in relation to the window that the dialog box applies to.
January 5th, 2004 at Jan 05, 04 | 1:07 am
No problem for those who have extended keyboard navigation selected. They can do it all from the keyboard.
January 5th, 2004 at Jan 05, 04 | 1:26 am
True — but I’d rather not go there again :). I still cannot bring myself to turning full keyboard access on, because it causes a significant increase in the number of times I have to use the tab key to go back and forth between controls.