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From: Pd on 7 May 2008 06:32
Editing an event - Cmd-I or Cmd-E to edit.
Cmd-E is better, Cmd-I gives you an Edit or Done button, neither of
which respond to Enter or Return, so you either have to tab until you
reach them and hit space-bar, click on them, or do something else that I
haven't discovered.

And what's "Done" - does that mean that the event is Done?
No, it means you're "done" editing the iCal item. I nearly forgot, I'm
not working on a calendar, I'm changing the values of noughts and ones
stored in a computer and displayed on a screen - wouldn't want to forget
that and just get on with scheduling my week, would I?

Having edited an event, how do I close the window? Not Enter, or Return.
It's not that they do anything else, they just beep helpfully. I think
that means "I could do the Done thing, but I'm not going to. I am,
however, polite enough to let you know I'm not going to do the Done
thing. Unlike my Cancel counterpart, Shift-Return, which not only does
nothing, but doesn't even beep to tell you it's doine nothing. Bad
manners, I call it."

In fact there isn't a way to cancel editing at all. There's no close
blob on the editing palettey cartoon dialog boxy pop-out thingummy that
Chris told me the name for but I've forgotten. There's no Cancel button.
If you press Esc, any changes are saved. What? That's even worse than
MacSoup, which at least has some internal logic.

Fortunately Undo still does that thing that Macintosh became admired
for, the consistency between applications thing, and does in fact Undo.

Here are three ways to close that editing dialog thing.
1. Tab until Done is haloed in blue (not highlighted like a proper
button), which gives you a clue that Return won't work, but space bar
will. Which kind of destroys the excuse that "we can't use Return to
confirm the edit, because what if you want Returns in the event text?"
Could've used Cmd-Return, or Enter to confirm the edit, then.
2. Press Esc. This *will* save changes, against all expectation.
3. Press Cmd-E (which has changed in the menu from "Edit Event...", to
"Done Editing Event"). You might think that because Cmd-E opens the edit
tabby thing, that Cmd-E would close it, but it doesn't.

It shrinks the dialog down to the pointless info window, which again
beeps helpfully to tell you Return and Enter won't do anything.

Now you have two buttons, Edit and Done.
Cmd-E presses the Edit button, and expands the dialog to edit the event.
No thanks, I've just come from there.

Cmd-D doesn't press the Done button, no, it duplicates the event, but
you can't delete the duplicate without closing this stupid info window.
(You can actually - you can Undo, which removes the duplicate and closes
the info viewer. I've seen people use this kind of routine - office
manager instructing new secretary how to put events into iCal: "And when
you've finished editing, you press Command-E, Command-D, Command-Z and
that will save the changes. Don't know why, we've always done it that
way and it works.")

Of course! Cmd-I closes the info window, because Cmd-I opens it from the
calendar view. So you can Cmd-E Cmd-I to close the edit thing. It turns
out you can simply Cmd-I to close it, too. So Cmd-E to open, Cmd-I to
close. Sweet, and obvious really. Now I can look clever in front of
people by whizzing around iCal with the keyboard, but they won't be able
to follow me because none of the key commands are what you might expect
and it will take them as long as it's taken me to work them out and
memorise them. Unless they're not as stupid as me, but they'll still
have to find out what the keys are, and won't be able to intuit them
from previous experience of almost every other Mac application in the
last 24 years.

What a complete pig's ear they've made of the iCal interface.
It's almost like serious thought has gone into making it not follow any
Mac keyboard conventions.

Is it like any *nix applications? Do NeXT or Gnome or KDE or whatever
interface Linux uses act this way? At least that might explain it, if
some junior X11 programmer had been given the task of implementing the
UI.

--
Pd
From: Martin S Taylor on 7 May 2008 08:03
Pd wrote
> What a complete pig's ear they've made of the iCal interface.
> It's almost like serious thought has gone into making it not follow any
> Mac keyboard conventions.

Not much to say except to agree.

And grumble that double-clicking on a day in month view adds a new event,
which takes about four clicks to delete, if (as is likely) you didn't mean to
introduce a new event.

And why can't double-clicking an event allow you to change its name?

And why isn't there a way to show whether there are notes attached to an
event?

Etc. Etc.

And why couldn't Now Software maintain Now Up-To-Date so it works with the
iPhone, instead of continuing to hype the vapourware which is Nighthawk?

MST

From: zoara on 7 May 2008 10:56
Pd <peterd.news(a)gmail.invalid> wrote:

> What a complete pig's ear they've made of the iCal interface.
> It's almost like serious thought has gone into making it not follow any
> Mac keyboard conventions.

Given that all iCal does nowadays (and maybe always has done, I'm not
sure) is display and update the system-wide calendar database - aka The
Truth - I'm surprised that no enterprising individual has written a
better interface.

Syncing to the truth means that all the general syncing stuff that goes
on will work for free; it really is a case of 'just' (and I know that's
a big 'just') writing an interface to the data.

I wonder why it hasn't happened? Maybe people are just not fussy enough.
I wish they were; the default calendaring and tasking interfaces on the
Mac are just not good enough, IMO.

-z-

--
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."
- Charles Darwin
From: Chris Ridd on 7 May 2008 11:12
On 2008-05-07 15:56:22 +0100, me18(a)privacy.net (zoara) said:

> Pd <peterd.news(a)gmail.invalid> wrote:
>
>> What a complete pig's ear they've made of the iCal interface.
>> It's almost like serious thought has gone into making it not follow any
>> Mac keyboard conventions.
>
> Given that all iCal does nowadays (and maybe always has done, I'm not
> sure) is display and update the system-wide calendar database - aka The
> Truth - I'm surprised that no enterprising individual has written a
> better interface.

AFAIK Now Up To Date and friends do exactly that, with a few knobs.

Bento can create/modify/delete calendar entries etc, can't it?

Cheers,

Chris

From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Fr=E9d=E9rique_=26_Her?==?ISO-8859-1?Q?v=E9_Sainct?= on 7 May 2008 13:30
zoara <me18(a)privacy.net> wrote:

> Given that all iCal does nowadays (and maybe always has done, I'm not
> sure) is display and update the system-wide calendar database - aka The
> Truth - I'm surprised that no enterprising individual has written a
> better interface.

Chandler?

--
Fr�d�rique & Herv� Sainct, h.sainct(a)laposte.net [fr,es,en,it]
Fr�d�rique's initial is missing in front of the above address
l'initiale de Fr�d�rique manque devant l'adresse email ci-dessus
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