Bookpedia: Two minor autofill UI issues

[elysdir]

I've stumbled over a couple of minor autofill problems a couple of times now; small things, but worth reporting.

To reproduce:

1. Make sure that "Jane Austen" is in your author autocomplete list.

2. Add a book with author name "John Austen".

3. Double-click the book in library view to bring up the info-editing window.

4. In the info-editing window, double-click the "John Austen" name to make it editable.

5. Double-click "John" to select it.

6. Type "Jane".

--> Autofill converts that to "Jane Austen" but leaves the last name that's already there in place. So now it says:

Jane Austen Austen

7. One common way to select from cursor to end-of-line in a one-line Mac text field is to press Shift+Down Arrow. So do that, hoping to select the second "Austen" to delete it.

--> Doesn't work.

Expected:

At step 6, I would expect autofill to be more aware of what's already in the field. If the rest of the field already contains the content that it's going to try to autofill, then it shouldn't autofill.

At step 7, I think that what's going on is that it's interpreting Shift+Down Arrow as the same thing as just Down Arrow, which (quite reasonably) moves the selection to the next autofill choice. But my expectation is that Shift+Down Arrow would be interpreted as a text-selection action rather than an option-selection option; in other words, I would expect Shift+Down Arrow here to behave differently from plain Down Arrow.

Workaround:

At step 6, pressing Esc cancels the autofill, leaving the field as intended. So this isn't a serious problem, but still figured it was worth mentioning.

[Conor]

Thank you so much for the detailed and accurate information. I was able to quickly reproduce and then spent most of the time trying to work around the issue. Sadly to fix properly the code changes require are within the Apple API. Bookpedia just creates a list of possible candidates based on the partial words and Apple does the rest. I will be submitting the information as a bug report to Apple in the hopes that the default behavior will get updated.

I was able to fix both issues, but the required code is quite a hack and needs serious testing. It has to cut in behind the back of the Apple editor and make changes that it's not expecting. Such as changing the focus of the user action back into the text field on option shift down arrow instead of in the list of possible options. So not sure if I will include it in an upcoming version. I will keep refining it.

Of course the proper way to update would be to write my own token field that works correctly, Apples always left small edges unpolished. But that is quite a bigger undertaking.

I very much appreciate all the clear steps.