OS X: Login window and the mighty focus thingie

May 1, 2008 @ 11:51

My personal computer is a MacBook Pro, e.g. a portable computer. A portable computer is often put into sleep mode by closing the lid.

Since I tend to bring my computer with me wherever I go, I have OS X setup so that it requires you to login once the computer wakes up from sleep or from the screensaver. This is a good thing™, but it has a very annoying quirk that I’ve been tolerating way too long.

When standing at the login in screen, with the text field for the password in focus, another application might ask for modal focus. In this case, the login window sometimes simply gives away its first responder status and becomes inactive, meaning that whatever I type no longer goes into the password text field, but somewhere else (to be honest, I really don’t know where).

Why Apple, why? This clearly isn’t very user friendly? At the login window, it only makes sense if the login window itself has focus. I’ve filed yet another bug at Cupertino (rdar://5903123), so let’s hope the engineers fix this for 10.5.3+.

Bug: iCal doesn’t always respect alarm setting on to do items

April 16, 2008 @ 18:55

Since Apple refuses to make their bug database public, I’m posting a summary of how to recreate a (very) annoying bug in iCal (at least on Leopard, 10.5.2):

In iCal: When creating an event in the day/week/month overview, and than dragging this event to the to do items and setting an alarm (by just choosing “Message”, which defaults to showing a reminder 15 minutes prior the to do items due timestamp), that alarm’s timestamp isn’t respected (when re-visiting the to do item, the item’s alarm is set to “the day before, at 23.45″).

This bug has been filed at Cupertino as rdar://5867919.


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