Dotting the “i” in iCal
Pierre Igot at Betalogue has some of the sharpest eyes in the blogging world. He repeatedly sees flaws in interface design that I overlook. Whether it is problems with the way Mail handles the format=flowed feature or threading, he’s got it nailed.
He’s done it again with iCal, pointing out something 
that I must have looked at a hundred times and never “seen”.
Pierre notes iCal’s inability to modify its language when the the value in question is not plural (as in this screenshot of an iCal alarm). He wonders whether anyone at Apple uses iCal and has noticed that it needs to be fixed.
Of course, it’s not earth-shattering. Still, Apple is a company that takes pride in the polish of its apps, so it rankles as Pierre point out:
Yeah, I know, it’s a detail. It’s not a bug. It doesn’t cause iCal to crash. It doesn’t cause iCal to fail to sound the alarm one hour before the event. So the problem is not high on anyone’s to-do list. But surely it is still somewhere on someone’s to-do list? And one day it will be fixed, right?
Now it will niggle at me too.
Similar Posts:
- User interface flaws in iCal
- iCal-alarmist: Customised alarms in iCal
- Mail.app: Threading, keyboard annoyances
- Savaging Mail’s sending silliness
- iCalFix 0.3.1: Automatic alarms for iCal
Tags: alarms, Apple, apple GUI, attention to detail, Betalogue, iCal, interface
October 12th, 2006 at 10:08 pm
It’s ironic, I noticed this when I started using iCal about 2 months ago… said to myself “ha, 1 hours – sounds like the way my 3-year-old talks” but I didn’t think anything of it as it’s a computer, it can’t be all-knowing.
Good to see I am not the only one that sees little things that my wife referrs to as an “annoying quality” of mine.
October 13th, 2006 at 1:39 am
I noticed this.. ‘issue’ back with my first use of iCal 1.0.
Frankly I’m not surprised that Apple hasn’t fixed it. While Apple may be big on polish – that typically means “appearance” and “visual” behaviours. I.e. the text content of things isn’t the first thing they notice. It’s the pretty graphics and buttons that they are looking at.
And frankly I don’t blame them. I saw this happen – and the reverse on occasion though I can’t remember specifics or provide examples. I saw it and said to myself “oh.. look at that” and promptly forgot about it. I mean.. who cares.
We are all smart enough to know what it means and while sure, it may be just laziness in not coding around it, it’s also only an issue for 1 possible choice for each of the categories of times – minutes, hours, days, before and after.
In fact, statistically, it is probably even less common in the ‘minutes’ category. 1 minutes doesn’t give you a lot of time to get ready for something. In the same way it’s probably not important that you can’t put in “100000″ hours before something as an alarm. (If you do it converts it to “32767″ ) It looks like the Max is 99999. However I’m sure the case doesn’t come up very often. So why fix it.
Really, I’m not sure it is worth the amount of extra code it would take to fix it – I’m a fan of “small” programs and while I don’t expect something like iCal to be tiny – every little bit smaller it can be is that much faster that it can run.
I think the greater challenge for date related applications is getting the “st”, “nd”
, “rd”, and various “th” extensions right for dates – though the easiest way around that is to not use date formats that use it. While I can look past it as well – I find it much more annoying to read “Tuesday October 3th” than “1 hours before”
October 13th, 2006 at 7:06 pm
Apple’s localization guys have worked around this in the German version of Mail.app: There it says “Stunde(n)”, i.e. “hour(s)”.
But that’s probably even a worse solution — the wrong “hours” looks like “somebody missed this one”, but “hour(s)” looks like “somebody was too lazy to do this right” …
October 19th, 2006 at 7:06 am
I suffered this issue myself when I printed my wedding invitations. Not thinking about the number of guests most people will bring (one) I included the line “I’m bringing ___ people.” I got a number of them back with the word “people” crossed out and “person” written in.
I’m sure none of my invitees were offended at my improper grammar, but the issue certainly did burn my perfectionist britches.
October 19th, 2006 at 10:39 am
Well, since iCal was originally written by the Apple France group (IIRC), I give them a little slack on English grammar. And like you said, it’s not really a bug as much as a niggle.