RE: Apple and Cocoa (why don't they eat their own dog food?)
RE: Apple and Cocoa (why don't they eat their own dog food?)
- Subject: RE: Apple and Cocoa (why don't they eat their own dog food?)
- From: Chris Hanson <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 12:22:22 -0600
At 4:10 PM +1100 1/13/03, Salter, Adam Q wrote:
I'm an old Mac user, went with the flow to Windows and just returned to the
pure UNIX way. But I have to say one thing I took for granted under Windows
was the text items useability... Mac Text editing commands don't seem to
have a standard.
There is a standard on the Macintosh and there has been a standard
for somewhere between one and two decades. (I'm not sure if the
standard was originally developed for the Lisa in 1983 - which did
have arrow keys - or for the Mac Plus in 1986. Or if it evolved in
the late 1980s.)
The arrow keys move the insertion point. Shift is used to extend the
selection. Option is used to move the insertion point up or down by
one page, and right or left by one word. Command is used to move the
insertion point to the top or bottom of a document, or beginning or
end of a line.
Page up and page down move the scroll bar of the view the insertion
point is in, not the insertion point itself. Home and End also move
the scroll bar of the view the insertion point is in, to the top and
bottom respectively. This was decided in early 1987 when the
Macintosh SE and Mac II were released along with the Apple Extended
Keyboard.
These key bindings are all standard across almost all Macintosh
applications. Any application using the Cocoa text system gets them
for free. I believe Carbon applications using the Unicode text
editing control also get at least some of these bindings for free.
Any application using TextEdit in Carbon has to implement them
itself, which is where things start to fall apart. But honestly it's
not very hard to implement these behaviors properly. Unfortunately
some applications like Microsoft Word brokenly implement the Windows
behaviors instead and actively make it difficult to make text editing
work properly. In Microsoft Word you actually have to use Visual
Basic for Applications to write macros to make the scroll bars leave
the insertion point alone! And then you run the risk of getting your
macros included with your documents and all sorts of crap like that.
So it's not really Apple's problem; the guidelines have existed for a
*long* time and been relatively easy to implement for that entire
time. And they're trivial to implement in Cocoa applications. The
blame lies with developers who don't adhere to Apple's human
interface guidelines.
-- Chris
--
Chris Hanson, bDistributed.com, Inc. | Email: email@hidden
Custom Application Development | Phone: +1-847-372-3955
http://bdistributed.com/ | Fax: +1-847-589-3738
http://bdistributed.com/Articles/ | Personal Email: email@hidden
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