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C4 Tip: Drag-and-drop text in Cocoa apps
During The Grube's UI presentation at C4, he pointed to one particular example of "functional inconsistency" in Apple's software: the discrepancy in results when you drag-and-drop text in Carbon apps (TextWrangler, AppleWorks, etc.) vs. Cocoa apps (TextEdit, Safari, etc.).When you select text in Carbon applications, you're able to drag the text by simply clicking the selection and dragging it. In Cocoa apps, however, you need to click the selected text and hold the mouse button down for a fraction of a second before you're able to drag it. Your cursor changes from the text selector to the pointer. But clicking and immediately dragging results in you re-selecting the text.The Cocoa differentiation is a result of NeXT designing a way to enable both dragging and re-selecting, which was carried into OS X.It's a minor inconsistency, but has frustrated me countless times. Glad that's all cleared up.Thanks John!
C4 commenceth (Day One) [Updated]
"Gee," said the man across the table, clearly pushing for my attention. "You haven't posted anything yet!"I looked up from my complimentary breakfast muffin, confused."You're supposed to be blogging this!"Oh, right. Good idea.I'm here in Chicago, Illinois, after traveling a great distance (3 miles) to attend Jon "Wolf" Rentzsch's two-day C4 Mac developers conference. And like every Mac conference before it, it makes me giddy with glee.Glee.Let's forfeit the pleasantries and get straight to it, shall we? Click on to read my Day One recap of C4.Yes, glee.
Daring Fireball on why Apple won't open source apps
Thank God Gruber quit his day job to write Daring Fireball. Even when I disagree with him (which I admit is almost never), I always enjoy and respect what he has to say, and today is no different: In response to an article by Tim Bray questioning why Apple won't open-source its most popular apps (Mail, Safari, iChat, etc.), Gruber points out a fact that we often forget: Apple's in it for the money, and they use the popular apps included in OS X as an incentive to upgrade when the Mac-maker uncages a new cat. After all, most of the system's user-noticeable upgrades lie in improvements to the applications, not the OS itself, and if developers could manhandle the code and release a better version themselves more frequently, what's the point in buying a $130 piece of software?Gruber explains it much better than I can in his article, so give it a read.
Gruber GUI Interview
John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame was interviewed over at GUIdebook and it's an interesting read that you should take a look at if you ever find yourself thinking about the way Apple's GUI (graphical user interface) looks and functions.
