More on clicking and dragging to select in Apple’s Mac OS X applications

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
September 27th, 2009 • 10:49 am

As with my posts about selection highlighting in column view in the Finder, my posts discussing selection by dragging in Mail and other Apple applications have been generating a fair amount of e-mail correspondence.

The fact is that, here again, even experienced users—including myself—have various degrees of awareness of how things actually work in Mac OS X—let alone why they work the way they work.

In an attempt to clarify the actual situation in Mail and other applications, I should probably recap what I have been able to find out so far.

In Mail 4.x, when you click and drag vertically in the message list, regardless of where in the line you click and drag, the application responds by creating a contiguous selection of a series of messages. Even if you click and drag on something that is already selected (say, in order to move the selection to a mailbox in the mailbox drawer on the left), if you are unfortunate enough to begin your dragging movement in a more or less vertical direction, Mail will respond by creating a new contiguous selection of messages starting where the new click took place. It will entirely ignore your current selection and start again from scratch.

The only way to make sure that your clicking and dragging will actually move the already selected items is to begin your dragging movement in a more horizontal direction, regardless of where your target mailbox actually is located in the mailbox drawer. In other words, even if your target mailbox is in a location in the mailbox drawer that, relatively to the location of the selected message(s) you want to drag to it, warrants a more or less vertical dragging movement, you still have to begin your movement in a more horizontal direction. Otherwise, you won’t be able to drag the selection to its intended location and you will actually lose your selection and create a new contiguous selection because of the way Mail will respond to your actions.

And, as indicated in my previous post on the topic, while this situation already existed prior to Mail 4.x (Snow Leopard), it appears that, in Snow Leopard, Apple’s engineers have “fine-tuned” the response so that the angle within which your dragging is interpreted as being in a vertical direction is now wider, thereby aggravating the problem in the situation described above. It is highly unfortunate.

Now, several readers have written to write that the situation is not limited to Mail but also applies to the Finder (in list view and column view) and other Apple applications, including Address Book with its “Group” and “Name” columns.

But the reality appears to be more complex that this. In the Finder, for example, when you are working on a window in list view or column view, clicking and dragging in a vertical direction also creates a new contiguous selection, but only if your initial click is located in the empty space between the text labels for each file or folder listed. If your click is located on the text of the very name or date modified or size or kind of an item in the list, then, even if your dragging goes in a perfectly vertical direction, the Finder’s response will not be to create a new contiguous selection, but to move the current selection (if your click is on something that’s already selected) or the item underneath the click (by click-through, without changing your current selection, if your click is on something that is not currently selected).

In addition, if your click is on something that is already selected, even if it is in an empty space between the file name, date modified, size, etc., and even if it is in a perfectly vertical direction, the Finder will not ignore the current selection and will not create a new contiguous selection, but it will respond by moving the current selection.

In other words, the very higlighting of the item you are clicking on, even if you are clicking on the empty space next to the file name or date modified or size, will act as a proxy for the item itself and, since it’s already selected, your dragging will move the selection.

It makes sense (because the highlighting colour covers the empty space as well), but it is significantly different from what happens in Mail. In Mail, if you click and drag on the empty space next to a message’s subject text or date modified or size or whatever, even if the item is already selected, Mail will ignore the current selection and create a new one. In other words, in Mail, even though the highlighting colour covers the empty space between the text, that empty space does not act as a proxy for the selected items.

Why the inconsistency? You’ll have to ask Apple’s engineers. But the reality is that Mail’s message list and a Finder window in list view are both list views, with many common aspects (including the alternating row colouring, column layout, etc.), and they should probably behave in the exact same way, which they obviously do not.

I should also note that, in the Finder, you can actually create a new contiguous selection by clicking and dragging in the empty space next to the file names even if you are dragging in an almost horizontal direction. (Obviously if it’s perfectly horizontal you won’t select more than one item.) In other words, the Finder’s response does not depend on the direction of the dragging. It depends on the location of the click, i.e. whether it’s on the text labels of the item in the list or on the empty space between the text labels.

What about Address Book? Well, even though the columns in Address Book look more like a Finder window in column view than a Mail viewer window in list view, the behaviour is actually the same as in Mail, i.e. the behaviour will depend on the direction of the dragging, and not on the location of the click.

As for iTunes, well, we all know that, even though it is a list view very similar to the one in Mail or in the Finder in list view, the behaviour is yet again different. You cannot create a contiguous selection of multiple items by simply clicking and dragging in a vertical direction, whether it’s on the text of the tags or in the empty space in between. The only way to create a contiguous selection is to use shift-click.

And what about “Open” dialog boxes in various applications? Presumably, since they are analogous to Finder windows and you can even switch between list view and column view, they should behave in the same way as Finder windows, right?

Wrong. In “Open” dialog boxes, list view and column view behave in the same way as… Mail’s message list. So even if Apple had a valid reason (albeit unfathomable for the rest of us) for using in Mail a behaviour different from the one in the Finder, that underlying logic is bound to break completely when you consider that list view and column view in “Open” dialog boxes behave in the same way as Mail’s message list. Unless there is something about “Open” dialog boxes that makes them more analogous to a list of messages in Mail than to a Finder window. I have no idea what that something could be, but hey, I am not an Apple engineer.

(I am also unable to verify whether the wider angle for vertical dragging that appears to have been introduced in Mail 4.x also applies to these dialog boxes and to the lists in Address Book. To me, it feels like the wider angle in Mail does not apply to those lists, but I could be wrong.)

The bottom line here, as far as I am concerned, is that the inconsistencies simply don’t make sense. Even if there is some hidden philosophical or logical justification for them, for Mac users in real-life computing, it’s hard to imagine that this justification matters at all, and the end result is that users are faced with something that feels inconsistent and unpredictable and is impossible to get used to. (How can the user be expected to remember, each time he brings up an “Open” dialog box, that the behaviour will be like the one in Mail and not the one in the Finder?)

And so we’re back to the frustrations expressed in my initial posts on the subject. Only now we have a more accurate description of what is actually taking place and what the different behaviours are. But it does not make them any easier to live with, and the wider angle in Mail 4.x is still a pain in the ass.


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