[squeak-dev] Re: mouseOverForKeyboardFocus default for 4.5

Chris Muller asqueaker at gmail.com
Thu Jan 23 23:45:34 UTC 2014


> This is a separate problem. IMHO, Mac Finder has the correct way to handle
> clicking in a list without focus.
> Open a Mac Finder window and select several items. Then open another Finder
> window. You'll see the selection of the original window get paler (which is
> a great piece of visual feedback; I'm often fooled because I'm looking at a
> browser window list pane and the blue selection makes me think I can scroll
> with the arrow keys). Then, click anywhere in the Finder list with the
> selection. A mouse down does nothing (maybe Squeak's pre-selection would be
> even better here) unless you start dragging (which does what you'd expect),
> but on mouse up, all it does is give the list focus, preserving the
> selection.

I'm totally unfamiliar with Apple but resolving the ambiguity between
gaining focus and activating the underlying widget would be a big
improvement over what Squeak and Windows XP does.

> Regarding the question at hand, I think point-to-focus would be much more
> useful if windows made an effort to open under the active hand, but agree

They actually do for modal popups, thank goodness.

> that for new users, click-to-focus will be easier on their muscle memory.
> Let's keep their brainpower for the blue plane :)

You're vote don't count here, sorry.  :)  But keeping brainpower is
precisely my reason for wanting to change it -- I see people
constantly "fighting" the UI because they're activating stuff they
don't want to activate, which suddenly puts them in a mode of thinking
about the UI and not the domain.  When I see it, I just shake my
head...


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