Since we had a 'certified' Apple Software Engineer (sounds better than "Programmer" I guess...) at our MUG meeting this week, I asked him about an annoyance that had been bothering me in Snow Leopard's Finder. Specifically, with a Finder window open (Column or List view) but not as the frontmost window (other apps/windows visible), when one clicks on something in that Finder window, it is not selected/activated. Instead the only thing that happens is that the Finder window comes to the front. I would have sworn that the previous behavior was that any clicked item would have been selected. Matter of fact, I remember forming a habit of
not clicking randomly on a Finder window if I
didn't want to lose what I might have previously selected something there.
"Oh, that's the desired, appropriate response." OK, then why does clicking on an icon in the
inactive Finder window Toolbar activate that item/app/file?
"Oh, I didn't realize that! Uhmn, that's not correct...shouldn't be that way..." And he then proceeded to show me, again, how things should work, according to Apple. That is, until he changed the view to Icon! In that case, clicking an icon in an
inactive Finder window actually highlighted that icon! "Oops, that's not right, either."
Here's a link to an article by someone else who is annoyed by this sometimes available, sometimes not behavior: <
Pierre Igot at ßetalogue>