“If nothing happened, you probably did not press the button quickly enough the second time.”

I like learning new things, and I like learning new old things. I was looking at Apple Human Interface Guidelines from 1987 and this passage caught my attention:

The most common use of double-clicking is as a shortcut way to perform an action. For example, clicking twice on an icon is a faster way to open it than clicking once to select it, then choosing Open from the File menu; clicking twice on a word to select it is faster than dragging through it.

I knew that double click an icon was a shortcut to the first action (typically Open), but I never really thought of double-clicking a word as a faster way to drag across to select it – even though, in hindsight, it makes perfect sense.

Another vintage thing I learned of recently from a coworker is this, also covered in the 1987 HIG:

If the user begins a double-click sequence, but then drags the mouse between the mouse- down and the mouse-up of the second click, the selection becomes a range of words rather than a single word.

This doesn’t feel (to me) like a very pleasant gesture to perform repeatedly, but what feels nice about it is that it automatically snaps the selection to the endings of the words:

Part of me would prefer this to be the default behaviour when selecting more than 3 words, or so, so you could be less precise.

Anyway. The double clicking to perform default action applies to a lot of lists of things. Here are some examples from Scrivener, Word, and Lightroom – you can double click on each of these items to proceed, without having to select and click the button:

But sometimes the creators of such dialogs forget. Here’s Screen Sharing in MacOS, and a notification in Chrome where only the slow path is available – double clicking on items doesn’t do anything:

The tricky part about not being a good citizen of a shared user interface is that those omissions aren’t just local to your app – they can ruin the gesture in other places, as people’s fingers learn to distrust it in not just your app, but in general.

(The quote in the title is from Apple Macintosh User’s Handbook.)

#flow #mouse #text editing