Finder Gripe: Group Selecting is Counter Intuitive...
Group Selecting Items from a List is Counter Intuitive in Finder (and Mail, Address Book, ...)
Does anybody else suffer with me on this one?...
When you are group selecting items from a list with shift - such as a list of emails in Mail or and list of files/folders in Finder or names in Address Book - the selecting behaviour seems very wrong.
Try this... take Finder, in single column mode, and go to a folder that has a few files in it. Select an item (file or folder) with a single click near the middle so that it's highlighted (blue). Now hold down the shift key and arrow up so that a bunch of files get selected (blued).
Now say you've gone too far and you want to come back on yourself. What's the most intuitive thing to do? You continue holding down the shift key and simply start pressing the down arrow key to deselect, right? Wrong!
That action (hitting a shifted down arrow) will select those items below the first item that you highlighted. Now, that's what I call really counter intuitive and very confusing. In effect, the cursor has jumped in hyper-space when you switch arrow keys.
This is really frustrating!
Is this the best way of describing the problem?
Cheers Daniel
Does anybody else suffer with me on this one?...
When you are group selecting items from a list with shift - such as a list of emails in Mail or and list of files/folders in Finder or names in Address Book - the selecting behaviour seems very wrong.
Try this... take Finder, in single column mode, and go to a folder that has a few files in it. Select an item (file or folder) with a single click near the middle so that it's highlighted (blue). Now hold down the shift key and arrow up so that a bunch of files get selected (blued).
Now say you've gone too far and you want to come back on yourself. What's the most intuitive thing to do? You continue holding down the shift key and simply start pressing the down arrow key to deselect, right? Wrong!
That action (hitting a shifted down arrow) will select those items below the first item that you highlighted. Now, that's what I call really counter intuitive and very confusing. In effect, the cursor has jumped in hyper-space when you switch arrow keys.
This is really frustrating!
Is this the best way of describing the problem?
Cheers Daniel
Comments
cmd-click your frustrations away.
Sorry, I'm really not sure what you mean by that.
Since posting I've been shown a much more detailed description of the problem here:
http://daringfireball.net/2006/08/highly_selective
Cheers Daniel
Sorry, I'm really not sure what you mean by that.
Since posting I've been shown a much more detailed description of the problem here:
http://daringfireball.net/2006/08/highly_selective
Cheers Daniel
Yes...I know what you mean. But there's currently nothing we can do about it 'cept keep telling Apple of this problem.
The only solution is to cmd-click the selected items that you want to deselect.
On the other hand, I often want to select up or down to some item that is not yet visible in a small listbox. So I need to shift-arrow down blindly. I don't know if the item I want is coming up next or after 20 items, so I usually go one or two items over and back up. This is why the selection needs to be backwards adjustable.
This belongs to my top 5 UI irritations in OS X. It burns me every day.
Amorya
What's the best way to let Apple know that we think this is a problem?
- An online petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/ ?
- A bug filed through ADC at http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter/ ?
- A feedback report through http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/ ?
- Another way?...
Cheers Daniel