One Bad Apple

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OK, I'm sticking with Macs for now, because I was a UNIX programmer, Mac OS X is UNIX, and I can work smoothly at the command-line interface.

Otherwise, I think Apple's user interface group has lost their minds. For instance, if I'm getting my Mac mail on the Web, my session will time out after 30 minutes. OK, cool, there's some security concern here. But what happens? I'm presented with a dialogue box that says my session has timed out, with an 'OK' button. I click 'OK,' and am brought to a screen that says "Your session has timed out," and presents me with a button that says "Log back in." I click on that, and finally get to the login screen. Yo, yo, Apple dudes, why not send the logged out user straight to the login screen? The two screens in between do nothing but require me to click 'OK' twice. What the hey?

In the Mac OS X native mail application, the up or down arrow at first moves you between messages. That's OK -- let's shift the focus by clicking in the window pane showing the text of the current message. Then hit the up or down arrow -- CRIKEY, MATE! It still moves between messages, not within the current message. Didn't Apple develop this idea of one part of the UI having the focus, and that all user actions should relate to that focused area? What in the world has gone wrong with their software developers?

Comments

  1. Anonymous10:25 AM

    Hmm, when I click in the window pane containing the text of an email in Apple Mail, it moves up and down within the text of the email, not up and down between messages. I still use Tiger, so maybe they screwed it up in Leopard...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous10:48 AM

    Works fine for me in Leopard. I click in the
    message text area and now the arrow keys
    scroll the message. I looked for a preference
    somewhere, but could not find anything?
    What version of OS X are you running?
    (Please don't say Panther!)

    ReplyDelete
  3. gcallah10:41 AM

    Oops, sorry, it's also the Web interface that beahves that way -- clicking in the message pane and arrowing still moves between messages.

    ReplyDelete

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