Comments on: Stay Responsive

By: Jon Crosby

Jon Crosby — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 12:05:47 +0000

Daniel, thank you for the tip! This works like a charm. And for what its worth, this very situation where a user clicks the plus button before “officially” ending their editing task seems to have popped up with a decent number of Actiontasic users. I imagine that some of them get in a routine of typing while leaving the mouse over the plus button for a quick click when entering a series of items.

By: Mike Abdullah

Mike Abdullah — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 15:08:24 +0000

A very good point. I shall have to look into this :)

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 16:21:57 +0000

Mike: but when the sheet is then dismissed, your user would probably prefer to have the original focused field remain focused. That’s exactly the situation I’m contending with here.

By: Mike Abdullah

Mike Abdullah — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 13:01:36 +0000

Ah, I hadn’t realised that -commitEditing messed with the first responder. I guess I think I must of only ever used it in situations where a sheet is about to appear, so the first responder doesn’t matter.

By: Jim Correia

Jim Correia — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 20:00:06 +0000

Mike,

-commitEditing is a the correct way to end editing for views bound to a controller. However, this has the same problem Daniel sought to avoid - after you are finished the window’s first responder is no longer the control the user left keyboard focus in. (And it requires the same sort of treatment.)

By: Mike Abdullah

Mike Abdullah — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 17:29:07 +0000

Personally, I’ve always found NSObjectController and -commitEditing to work nicely.

By: Jim Correia

Jim Correia — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 14:39:42 +0000

“continuously updates value” has its uses, but it isn’t always the right solution. One time where you don’t want to do this is when setting the value on the model is undoable.

Imagine typing “Fred” for someone’s name, then committing the edit in the field.

Undo should put it back to its previous value, without requiring you to step through

“Fre”
“Fr”
“F”
“Previous Value”

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 14:18:50 +0000

ssp: I can see that as a sort of ideal user experience - sometimes. Though frankly I think even the ideal behavior of, for instance, a text title simultaneously updating a window’s title as the user types would be so contrary to the ordinary behavior that some users might annoyed or distracted by it.

One problem that comes to mind is that by sending continuously you’d be exercising the formatter and/or validation method for the field, probably before the user has finished typing valid information. This has the potential to cause text fields to behave like those infuriating telephone-entry fields, where you never know whether the computer or the user is responsible for tabbing to the next field.

In general, I’d be wary of violating the traditional “safe, ponderous editing” phase that users now enjoy in most text fields.

By: ssp

ssp — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 10:16:42 +0000

I’m with ken on this… immediate updating is the way to go.

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 05:13:59 +0000

ken: whoah, I hadn’t considered that the “continuously updates value” option could be applied to a text field. But in this case I think it would be overkill because it’s only in the very specific situation that a user chooses to export that I want to “immediately update.”