Hey, what’s up with my Tiger? I didn’t realized it all the last weeks but why there is no keyboard shortcut anymore to cancel a dialog? It was a fine thing to only have to hit the space key. I mainly used it within Lightroom to delete an image from the database. But as I see now, the button hasn’t a small blue border anymore. It’s cumbersome to grab the mouse and navigate to the cancel button.
Does anyone of you also have this problem? I could imagine that this regression was caused by the latest Apple update 2007-009 which also half-killed my OS X installation.
Update: The button I talked about isn’t cancel itself, sorry. What I mean is the optional button e.g. “Delete from Disk” within the following image:
Update 2: See comment 4 for the solution.
I didn’t even now that this blue border means that I could use the space bar for hitting that button. Thanks for pointing that out. Anyway in OS X I’m missing this Windows feature of using a (I think it was the TAB) key for switching between the different buttons.
Thomas, that means you aren’t running into that problem? You have installed the latest updates?
I haven’t seen more than three buttons within a dialog yet. So using return (enter), space, or escape are enough to handle all these actions. You don’t have to switch through the buttons with tab. At least when you aren’t affected by the bug I see here.
Hi Henrik, I just installed the demo version of LightRoom to investigate that issue and I’m running into the exact same problem. However, I’m pretty sure that I saw a “correct” box with three buttons and this blue border just a couple of days ago in another program. Unfortunately I can’t remember the program to confirm this. I’ll report as soon as I find it.
Yay! I found the cause of this issue. Thanks goes to a co-worker. He wasn’t able to reproduce this on OS X with the latest patches (10.4.11). That’s why I was a bit wondering but remembered a former post of me about keyboard shortcuts to open contextual menus. When I had written this article I played around with the keyboard access options. I also changed the “Full keyboard access” under keyboard shortcuts to use text boxes and lists only. I switched back to “All controls” and voila now you can also switch between the different buttons. There is also a simple shortcut which turns that on/off: ^F7.
Personally I’m ok with this option within web pages so that you don’t have to hit space multiple times to iterate through all the given links. But limiting the user in dialogs isn’t nice Apple. But that’s its philosophy…