How should markers be attached from the palette?

Reiner · Post by **Reiner** » Fri May 04, 2007 7:16 am

While there are different ways to attach markers to selected text one option is to select text and double click to the marker's name in the marker palette. While single click has no function there I would like the markers to be attached with a single click in the palette.

aechallu · Post by **aechallu** » Sat May 05, 2007 5:31 pm

I agree with your suggestion. I think it's consistent with the "metaphor." The combo box shows the state of a string of characters. Changing the marker that is highlighted should change the state. (In contrast auto-title is no state; double clicking is the right action there, imho).

Mart°n · Post by **Mart°n** » Sat May 05, 2007 7:32 pm

I would also prefer the single click interface but think that this should be changed throughout the palettes, so it should work for Markers, Styles and Auto-Titles.
The problem with Markers and Styles is that a single click is currently used to select them in order to a second step. With Styles, you could select one style and edit, delete, save, rename… it with the buttons at the right hand of the styles palette. With Markers, you could select one Marker and search for the previous/next marked text. So selecting via single click is something that seems hard to be changeable.
The same is not true for the Auto-Titles palette. There’s no single click action at the moment, so it could be changed to “single click > enter auto-title” almost instantly.
One solution could be to apply the selection by hovering with the mouse over a entry but that’s not a common selection method in OS X (Microsoft built it into Windows 98 to select files and folders but it wasn’t used by many people). Maybe someone has a better idea.

nicka · Post by **nicka** » Sat May 05, 2007 10:53 pm

With Markers, you could select one Marker and search for the previous/next marked text.

You mean search for the next text marked with that marker? That is how it should work, in my opinion, but actually it doesn't. Regardless of the marker selected, clicking on next (or previous) marker buttons takes you to the next (or previous) marker of any colour. To search for text marked with a particular marker, you Command-double click (forward search) or Command-option-double click (backward search). (See the manual, page 89.)

ptram · Post by **ptram** » Tue May 08, 2007 12:00 pm

It must be noted that double-clicking is due the first time you apply a particular marker. The next time you must simply click on the hand icon, and the already selected marker will be applied with just one click.

Paolo

Mart°n · Post by **Mart°n** » Tue May 08, 2007 12:22 pm

nicka wrote:
With Markers, you could select one Marker and search for the previous/next marked text.
You mean search for the next text marked with that marker? That is how it should work, in my opinion, but actually it doesn't.

You’re right. I’ve read the chapter and also translated it for the German manual but I anyway thought that it should work this way. As it doesn’t, there’s actually no barrier (other than consistent behavior of single clicks across all palettes) to change the marker palette to single click mode.

Mart°n · Post by **Mart°n** » Tue May 08, 2007 12:33 pm

ptram wrote:It must be noted that double-clicking is due the first time you apply a particular marker. The next time you must simply click on the hand icon, and the already selected marker will be applied with just one click.

That’s right, but on the other hand, that button could be erased if you could apply the markers with a single click. The current behavior (select and hit ok [the apply button is nothing else than a ok button with an icon] is the thing I don’t like in almost all “old style” applications. It was a widely used way of performing actions but it isn’t the preferred way of performing actions in OS X. Word (up to 2003, I guess) uses the very same method in many of it’s dialog windows and also apps as Adobe Illustrator work (partially) this way (you have to set up something and see the result only if you hit the OK button).
Most true OS X applications (the ones that were developed for OS X only and didn’t have a predecessor for OS 9 or Windows) use the “instant” or “real-time” behavior. You change a color in the color selector and the color of your text/graphic will be changed in “real time” (also works in Mellel), you change the Font or the font size with the slider (in TextEdit, Pages, OmniGraffle…) the font/size of your document changes accordingly (works for the font in Mellel but if you like to change the size to other than the pre-defined values, you have to do a round trip to do this).

So I would like to see the single click / real time / instant results way in more areas of the Mellel interface, the Markers Palette is just the top of the iceberg.

Mart°n · Post by **Mart°n** » Tue May 08, 2007 12:36 pm

If I look at the poll results, there was one person that preferred “double clicking”. If that person reads this post, I would like to know why one prefers that behavior. Maybe I’ve missed that point.

stoic · Post by **stoic** » Tue May 08, 2007 1:05 pm

This might sound like heresy, but I'd like the process to more closely resemble that in MS Word. First, one goes to the Marker palette and selects the color of the marker. In doing so, the cursor becomes something like a highlighter. One then returns to the text, simply selecting those words, passages, paragraphs, etc., that one wants marked — and they are marked automatically, without returning to the palette.

I hate Word, but this just seems more natural and intuitive to me, more like actually marking up a manuscript with a real marker — i.e., one doesn't put the marker down after each piece of text is marked, but rather goes through the entire text marking the passages in which one has some special interest. It just makes more sense.

Mart°n · Post by **Mart°n** » Tue May 08, 2007 1:39 pm

stoic wrote:This might sound like heresy, but I'd like the process to more closely resemble that in MS Word. First, one goes to the Marker palette and selects the color of the marker. In doing so, the cursor becomes something like a highlighter. One then returns to the text, simply selecting those words, passages, paragraphs, etc., that one wants marked — and they are marked automatically, without returning to the palette.

I hate Word, but this just seems more natural and intuitive to me, more like actually marking up a manuscript with a real marker

I also thought about this and would prefer the marker working this way. I mostly use a Wacom graphic tablet with a pen as my main input device and if you already have a pen in your hand, nothing seems more natural than applying a marker this way. To erase the marker, you could turn the pen and use the eraser on the other end. While that would be great for my needs, I don’t know how exact others are about selecting some text. I’ve seen some people that need more than one try to select the piece of text they like to select. For them, the “select & apply” method would be better while I would really like the “instant apply” method. Pen support (which means mostly support for the eraser) would be great too.