Dotting the “i” in iCal
Thursday, October 12th, 2006
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.
Tags: alarms, Apple, apple GUI, attention to detail, Betalogue, iCal, interface