I took some time off last week and during that time off, a reader named Herman wrote to comment on my recent posts on the Finder’s column view and list view modes and the persistence of numerous bugs and inconsistencies, even in Snow Leopard, which was supposed to be a bug-fixing release. Herman mentioned something […]
iTunes playlist windows don’t work like Finder windows.
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 […]
This picture is part of the bottom edge of an inactive document window in Microsoft Word: When you have several document windows open in Word, the bottom edge of the foremost window has a number of active controls that can be used to access certain features. Here’s what the same window looks like when it’s […]
The inconsistency in the behaviour of controls (buttons, etc.) in background windows in Mac OS X when clicked upon — also known as click-through — has been discussed several times in this blog. Leave it to Microsoft, however, to screw up things even more than any other Mac OS X application. Take a look at […]
Here’s another example of click-through behaviour in Mac OS X that gets in the way of what you’re trying to do instead of being useful. As you know, in Mac OS X if you hold the command key down while clicking on a background window’s title bar, you can move that window without bringing it […]
There has been much debate about the implementation of click-through in Mac OS X and Mac OS X applications lately. The general consensus among Mac pundits is that Mac OS X’s implementation of click-through is flawed because it is often active by default, and often causes the user to trigger actions that he/she didn’t want […]
Go to Word X, open the Find/Replace dialog, and then switch to another application, in ORDER to put Word X’s windows in the background: Now hover with your mouse pointer over the Find/Replace dialog’s Close button. It turns red, as it should, because the Close button supports click-through for all windows in Mac OS X. […]
I am assuming that, if you are reading this, it’s because you are interested. :-) In other words, there is no such thing as too much discussion on valid UI design issues. With this in mind, head over to Daring Fireball for yet more interesting Mac punditry about click-through in Mac OS X, as discussed […]
John Gruber has posted yet another excellent item on the anarchy currently known as “click-through” in Mac OS X. Click-through is being used very inconsistently and very unpredictably across a whole bunch of Mac OS X applications, including Apple’s own. I find that it is simply impossible not to agree with John that click-through should […]
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 […]
This is something that has been bothering me for years, and apparently I must be the only one on the planet, or at least no one at Apple seems to care, because there has never been even an attempt to address the issue. Take a typical Finder window in column view used to browse the […]
In Apple’s Pages ’09 application, there are page elements that are simply too easy to click on and select accidentally when you actually mean to do something else entirely. The two most obvious targets here are page headers/footers and table cell borders. Let’s take a typical table in a Pages document: Right now the entire […]
I am looking forward to being able to use Rainer Brockerhoff’s new utility called Klicko. It promises to get rid of Mac OS X’s click-through behaviour, which has been, over the years, a source of both convenience and frustration. Since Klicko can be customized to only apply to some applications, I am thinking that I […]
An inconsistent behaviour that doesn’t really make sense.