(no subject)

[ewx]

Is there a generally accepted name for the Mac's completely bizarre mouse focus policy? If you don't know: click to focus for the left mouse button but point to focus for the others.

Comments

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

There are four possibilities when you click:

1. Nothing happens.
   
2. Window raised but object not selected.
   
3. Window not raised but object selected.
   
4. Window raised and object selected.

So there are 64 possible ways an object can respond to three mouse buttons.

Some examples:

• Folder in the Finder: click 4, ^click 4, ⌘click 4.
  
• Folder in Mail: click 4, ^click 3, ⌘click 3.
  
• Link in Safari: click 2, ^click 2, ⌘click 3.
  

I expect you can find objects which implement some of the other 61 possibilities.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Err, I may be missing something there, but you seem to be saying that there's lots of possibilities and no consistency in which gets chosen. Which seems to be just a generalization of what I said, except that I'm saying that the inconsistency is crazy, at least in specific cases.

I'm sure there might be places where it's not crazy but the practical effect is that I regularly find myself typing into one window when I thought I was operating on another, so I don't think I'm totally unjustified!

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

but you seem to be saying that there's lots of possibilities

Yes.

and no consistency in which gets chosen

I'm not sure I have quite enough data to be certain about this yet, but it looks that way, yes.

Which seems to be just a generalization of what I said

Indeed. You seem to be interpreting my comment as if I disagreed with you, but actually I agree with you. Maybe I should have said so explicitly?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Ah, the structure of your comment made me think it was going to be an explanation of why things were as they were, so when it didn't actually do that I was thrown into confusion l-)

[aardvark179.livejournal.com]

In some cases it's very deliberate user interaction choices (it should be possible to easily place keyboard focus in a safari window without accidentally following a non-obvious link, or on the other side clicking the pause button in iTunes probably means you want to pause now—whether the window has keyboard focus or not—because the pause button is big and obvious), but there seem to be a lot of hold overs from before they started taking this use case based approach.

One thing I think they've got wonderfully right in 10.5 which really annoys me in Windows is that scroll events go to the container the mouse pointer is over when you move the scroll wheel.