Betalogue

Brent Simmons (developer of NetNewsWire) has a problem with the click-through behaviour of the toolbar buttons in Mail 2.0.

I am not sure what his problem is. Either an application supports click-through — i.e. the ability to click on a toolbar button directly from another application — or it doesn’t. NetNewsWire doesn’t. Mail does.

Given that Mail does support click-through, it makes sense that the “mouse over” effect that occurs when you hover with your mouse pointer over the buttons should also occurs when you hover over the buttons directly from within another application. After all, if click-through is enabled, then the user should be warned that clicking on that button in that background window is actually going to trigger the button, and not just bring the window to the foreground.

In other words, I am not sure what Brent’s problem is. Surely it’s preferable to click-through behaviour that occurs without advanced warning, as in Safari, for example. (Safari’s toolbar buttons don’t change their status when you hover over them, either from within Safari or from elsewhere.)

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Tuesday, May 31st, 2005 at 1:13 am and is filed under Mail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.