No, that’s not the point. It can save a lot of keystrokes! Let’s say I want to find the next occurrence of “writeUnicodeToFile”. I press Cmd-F, W, R, … and hey, I’m there already, no need to keep typing. Or maybe I have to press a few more keys, depending on what text is in the file, but generally I don’t have to type nearly the full search string.
Mail is full of bugs anyway so I’m not surprised people complained.
(a) this was fifteen years ago and Mail was pretty awesome then. (And one of the smartest engineering teams I’ve worked with.) Agreed that it’s gone downhill a lot since.
(b) I’m talking about UI features, not bugs.
It depends on what the change is but in the old days things like this were a preference.
Preferences are really problematic for UI design. Too many prefs leads to confusion, features that most users never discover because they don’t grope into the prefs, and trouble using someone else’s computer or explaining to them how to do something. There’s also very often a better way to design a feature that doesn’t need a pref. Some UX designers feel that if there has to be a pref, the design has failed.
(I remember that circa 2000, using IMAP mail with Mac Outlook Express required configuring a ton of obscure prefs and account settings. I wrote up a multi-page memo describing how to do it. With OS X Mail, even in 10.0, IMAP Just Worked.)
That said, Xcode is a developer tool for expert users, and already has a ton of obscure prefs, so I could see adding one for this. (OTOH, it would require more than two people complaining about the feature…) You can vote for it by filing a Radar.
—Jens