Tiny Details: Large Double Click Areas To Edit Table Cells

There is a lot of good advice in Wil Shipley’s Monster Marketing talk. One topic that I’m striving for as I work on the successor to Billable is this one (and I’m paraphrasing a bit):

Spend time on the tiny details. This is all your program is, a collection of tiny details. A collection of little moments and if each moment delights the user they will love your software.

So with that said here is a tiny detail…

When implementing an editable NSTableView the default behavior to edit a cell is double click. This behavior is limited however to actually double clicking inside of the rendered text. While this might be appropriate for some, in my own app I want to be a little more forgiving.

Double Click To Edit Behavior

To do this simply create a delegate class for the table. Inside of the class setup the awakeFromNib: method to tell the tableView to use itself for the doubleAction.

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- (void)awakeFromNib
{
    [tableView setDoubleAction:@selector(doubleClickAction:)];
    [tableView setTarget:self];
}

Then define your doubleClickAction:.

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- (IBAction)doubleClickAction:(id)sender
{
    // make sure they clicked a real cell and not a header or empty row
    if ([sender clickedRow] != -1 && [sender clickedColumn] != -1) { 
        // edit the cell
        [sender editColumn:[sender clickedColumn] 
                       row:[sender clickedRow]
                 withEvent:nil
                    select:YES];
    }
}

Posted on: March 15, 2009 – 1:01 PM

2 Comments

  1. Dirk Stoop wrote:

    Thanks Mike!

    I have been procastinating about fixing this in Checkout for quite a while now, your post finally pushed me over the fence :)

    Cheers, - Dirk

  2. Mike Zornek wrote:

    @Dirk lol. Glad I could be of service. :)

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