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Matt’s next issue was with our column resizing behavior: “Have you ever seen a Mac program where when you widen and narrow a column the entire window widens and narrows like that?” Well, actually, I’m guessing you have, since we borrowed that behavior from the Finder! If you open a Finder window and switch to Column view, then drag the last column wider and narrower, you’ll find that it makes the whole window wider and narrower. |
This is under 10.5.3.
Anyone else seeing what I see?
Ken also asks
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Now, just because there’s precedent in the Finder doesn’t mean I’m saying that this is the most desirable behavior. But what is? What exactly do you expect to happen when you make the title field wider or narrower? Should we just pick another field at random to make wider or narrower to compensate for that change? Or should the column widths no longer match up with the width of the window, leading to lost fields off the edge or to dead space on the inside of the edge? Most approaches we’ve seen lead to lots of fiddling to try get all the columns to add up to just the right width to fit within the window. |
* How Mail under 10.5 does it: you can resize columns so the total width can't go beyond the width of the window. This works great: I can set a desirable window width, then adjust column widths until they all fit as I want.
* How every other Mac application does it: when you resize columns, you get a horizontal scroll bar and columns which don't fit the window size scroll off the right. This is a well-established behavior on the platform, and I don't think it would confuse users.
Last edited by jasong; 2008-06-26 at 06:55 PM..