Pierre Igot wrote a blog post “Shrinking and expanding selections in Mac OS X” (via Daring Fireball), in the first part of which he explains how text selection works on Mac OS X, and complains that this behavior is wrong. I disagree.

Let me explain. On Windows and Gnome, when you’re selecting text with mouse, the anchor is being placed on the final point of your selection (and it’s displayed with a blinking indicator in some applications like Notepad). If you select text from left to right, the anchor appears at the end of your selection:

If you go from right to left, the anchor is at the beginning of it:

Pierre writes:

What if I overshot by one character or two and actually only wanted to select the first two words? To me, since the selection with the mouse was made from left to right, intuitively I should be able to shrink the selection by one or two characters by pressing shift-Left a couple of times on my keyboard.

This seems logical: if you go left to right, you’ll probably miss a character of two, so placing anchor to the end of your selection is the right way. But this logic is flawed. It’s no harder to miss a character when you begin selecting text, than to miss it when you finish. Actually, there’s no way to select missing characters at the beginning at all, apart from starting your selection from scratch. There’s also a problem with double-clicking the word. Where should be the anchor placed in this case? Windows places it at the end of the word, while Gnome places it at the beginning.

Cocoa text controls behave differently. When you select text with mouse, the anchor is undefined. When you switch to keyboard, you control the anchor point: if you start by pressing Shift+Right, the anchor is being placed at the end of your selection, but with Shift+Left it’s being placed at the beginning. This way you can easily select missing characters in any part of your selection. Also, without anchor, you can continue growing your selection both ways.

Notice that I didn’t say that Mac OS X behave differently, just Cocoa. Carbon handle this the third way (the anchor is always where you click), but Apple is getting rid of it. That’s why Finder has anchored text selection with mouse. Good thing there are rumors that it’s being rewritten in Cocoa for Snow Leopard.

Yes, there’s inconsistency between text selection and list selection, but I have no explanation for this :)

Update: Pierre published a follow-up.

Just a short post to let you know what’s going on here at Coding Robots.

First off, January 2009 was the best month ever for the company since 2002. We’re looking forward to investing our time and money to bring you new versions of our products and some more fresh software.

BlogJet users would be happy to know that there’s a new version in development (as usual, we don’t disclose release dates, so stay tuned).

Mémoires 2.0 has been released recently, and there is an update in the works, so keep your feature requests and bug reports coming.

Finally, we’re working on an exciting new (secret) project that will revolutionize the way you                and               . We hope it will see the light of day this year.

Thank you for your support! Stay tuned.

From: Dmitry Chestnykh
To: All Staff
Subject: SOME BUTTONS TO BE DISABLED

Dear staff,

As you may have heard, bright minds over at Nielsen removed “Reply to All” button to eliminate bureaucracy and inefficiency.

Today Coding Robots Executive Council held an event called ¡ACT IMMEDIÄTELY!, and we developed a plan (inspired by can-doers at Nielsen) to further improve our productivity.

We developed four Mail toolbar configurations for different departments.

Support

Our technical support staff can have only two buttons: Get Mail and Reply. Obviously, they don’t need New Message and other non-productive buttons.

Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing can have four buttons: Get Mail, New Message, Reply to All, Add Address. We are aiming for the best exposure, that’s why they don’t have Reply button, and have Reply to All instead. They can’t have Forward button, because everyone out there is tired of Internet memes.

Developers

Developers can have three buttons: Get Mail, Bounce, Junk. They never use Reply and New Message anyway.

Executives

Finally, we, executives, decided to place stricter constraints on ourselves. Executives are allowed to have only one button: Take All Accounts Offline.

This is one of the many changes being implemented as a result of the ¡ACT IMMEDIÄTELY! initiative. In my next email I’ll talk about removing unnecessary buttons from your keyboards to further spread the productivity virus!

Best,
Dmitry Chestnykh
Chief Executive Officer

Sorry, we incorrectly said that upgrade from Mémoires has 60% discount off the full price. The upgrade ($17.95) is actually 60% of the full price of license, thus the discount is 40%.

Please accept our apologies for this mistake.

We are happy to announce Mémoires 2.0, a new major version of our journaling software!

We listened to you and implemented a lot of your suggestions in this version.

Here’s a list of changes. You can find more information on What’s New page.

• Show all entries. Your journals are now easier to browse: view all your entries in sidebar by clicking on the button or using new View menu.
• Automatically save journals. Mémoires will now automatically save your journals every 5 minutes and before closing, so you won’t lose a bit.
• Change date and time of entries. Entry title now conveniently shows date of entry creation. By clicking on it, you can change the date and time.
• Better look of search results. Search results now have the same background as normal entries list, and shows shorter date to leave more space for entry title.
• Check spelling as you type by default. While available in earlier versions, “Check spelling as you type” has been turned off by default. Now it’s on, so you can spot spelling mistakes on the fly.
• Entries are now created and sorted using correct time.
• Improved speed of browsing calendar and entries.
• Added View > Go To Today menu item.
• New application and document icons.
• Better look of entry title.
• Better look of dates with entries in calendar.
• Improved Help menu.
• Disable Entry > Remove menu item when there’s no selection.
• New crash reporter.
• Hide file extension when encrypting or decrypting file.
• Fixed rare issue with buttons appearing as pressed.
• Fixed typos in help.

Users of Mémoires 1.x can purchase an upgrade with 60% discount 40% discount (upd: sorry, I meant 60% of the price, which is 40% discount). If you bought Mémoires 1.x after December 1, 2008, you are eligible for a free upgrade, and we’ll send your new license today (if you didn’t receive it, please use lost key recovery page to get your key).

You can download Mémoires 2.0 from its product page.

We hope you’ll enjoy the new version!

When you launch BlogJet for the first time, it conveniently shows you a test post that you can publish to see if you have configured the program right. Early versions of BlogJet included the following quotation:

“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” — Pablo Picasso

Then I found a better quote on the Web and replaced Picasso’s one with it:

“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.” — Albert Einstein

It turns out, Albert Einstein didn’t say that. Instead, this quote is from Leo Cherne, an American economist.

This was discovered by Ben Shoemate, and he wrote a post in his blog about it:

People use quotes as a way to strengthen their own position. If I can quote someone you respect, it adds credibility to whatever argument I’m making. Over time, the truth gets further and further away. The biggest names have always attracted people who are more than willing to put words into their mouths for their own gain – Confucious, Jesus, Aristotle, Shakespere, Einstein, and the biggest, most misquoted, of them all – God. All of them have probably been quoted more for the things they never said, than things they actually did say. I imagine this is the most disappointing part of time travel, waiting around to witness words never spoken and deeds never done.

Ben made a research to found the actual source and author. You can read more in his blog.

I’m totally agree with him, and I’m sorry that I helped spread the disinformation. Here’s the lesson: when you’re looking for a good quotation, don’t trust a few websites — do a better research.

xkcd comic

Thanks, Ben!

P.S. See also Wikipedia’s List of misquotations.

“What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.” — Walter Scott

Make a commitment to write journal regularly.

Set up a schedule that suits you and follow it. Don’t skip writing sessions if you don’t know what to write about — just start with a rough paragraph and keep developing it (see “Write” section below).

Choose tools that are convenient and inspiring.

Moleskine

For instance, Mémoires, our journaling software, is a simple and effective tool that keeps you focused on your journal’s content, not the application itself.

You’d want to keep your journal on your computer, and here’s why:

• it’s searchable (easy to find everything your wrote about);
• secure (no need to hide anything, just remember your password);
• editing and rewriting is easy.

However, you may need a small paper notebook when you’re away from your computer — try tiny Moleskines or Field Notes. Just remember to type entries back into your journaling software.

Continue reading: How to write a journal →

Website

We are pleased to announce the new Coding Robots website. It has a fresh modern design, better usability, and improved load speed. If you’re reading this through RSS, check it out!

Forums

We are also resurrecting the old forums in a new format. It appears, switch to Google Groups was a mistake: some users were complaining that groups were not as convenient to use as forums, discussions slowed down, plus there were a lot of spam. (I wrote a forum topic about this).

Welcome back to the old new forums at http://forum.codingrobots.com!

Blog and Twitter

Usually, we published a couple of posts per month in our blog. Starting today, we’ll be blogging more on various topics in our niche: blogging, writing journals, design, and more. If you haven’t subscribed to our RSS feed (or by email) yet, do it now, so that you don’t miss anything interesting. We also have a Twitter account you can follow — http://twitter.com/codingrobots.

Enjoy

Take a look at our website, and if you find any mistakes or bugs, please let us know.

Thank you for staying with us!

P.S. We have some t-shirts for you.