“If nothing happened, you probably did not press the button quickly enough the second time.”

I like learning new things, and I like learning new old things. I was looking at Apple Human Interface Guidelines from 1987 and this passage caught my attention: The most common use of double-clicking is as a shortcut way to perform an action. For example, clicking twice on an icon is a faster way to open it than clicking once to select it, then choosing Open from the File menu; clicking twice on a word to select it is faster than dragging through it. I knew that double click an icon was a shortcut to the first action (typically Open), but I never really thought of double-clicking a word as a faster way to drag across to select it – even though, in hindsight, it makes perfect sense. Another vintage thing I learned of recently from a coworker is this, also covered in the 1987 HIG: If the user begins a double-click sequence, but then drags the mouse between the mouse- down and the mouse-up of the second click, the selection becomes a range of words rather than a single word. This…