Ah, yes… The Disclosure Triangle… how many
of you out there know what this is? How many of you are just plain-ole
typical Mac users who couldn't be bothered with all the technical
minutiae that many of the “other” TMO readers thrive on? Alas, I am
firmly ensconced in this latter group that thrives on geeky frippery.
That goes without saying.
However, with any personal computing device, there are always those
tantalizing technical tidbits that turn out to be truly useful to
everyone but are often hard to intuit without diving into documentation.
Who reads the owner’s manual anyway? Who even gets an owner’s manual to
begin with?
I am like the magician who discloses how the tricks are done and then
gets shunned by his colleagues. It’s not quite like that for me, but I
do like to offer up techie tips
and tricks that are in my Apple consultant’s bag-o-tricks. Colleagues
may keep these closely guarded, I love sharing them and help simplify
other users’ workflow.
One of these tips is knowing how to find hidden features and commands
in OS X and within apps themselves. I already introduced you to the
elusive help facilities embedded everywhere but often ignored.
Two typical Disclosure Triangles
Now it’s time to examine the Disclosure Triangle. It’s very elusive.
Many applications use this common method for exposing commands not
usually available elsewhere, such as in the application menus.
The problem is that this triangle – sometimes an arrowhead – is
frequently quite minuscule. Additionally, of late, interface elements
have been harder and harder to see either because of high resolution
settings on physically smaller screens or the lack of sufficient
contrast. Also, what the more seasoned Mac users are getting frustrated
about is a tendency for developers to place their small medium-gray
graphic thingamabobs on dark-gray backgrounds, or light-gray ones on
white backgrounds. But, don’t get me started.
So, the Disclosure Triangle, albeit tiny, invites you to click or tap
on it to show you – “disclose” – a pop-up menu with additional
commands available to you, a side-panel or other information.
Hovering the cursor over toolbars in Photoshop will
reveal the tiniest of Disclosure Triangles. Any smaller and rules of
physics are broken, causing destruction of cataclysmic proportions
The figure above shows an extreme and outrageous example, and Adobe
continues to do this in it’s photo editing products. Adobe seems to
think that we vision acuity is comparable to that of an electron
microscope. In this example, many of Photoshop’s editing tools seen in
the toolbar have additional tool variations hidden at the same location
on the toolbar. However, to view these alternate tools and to switch to
them, you need to hold down the option key and click on that particular
tool. Here’s the thing: to determine which of the tools have these
hidden variations, you need to hover your cursor over the tool bar, at
which time microscopic two-molecule by two-molecule sized disclosure
triangles pop up.
I frequently tell my students to always look around the interface for
little tell-tale symbols: triangles, arrowheads, tiny question marks,
little “grab-handles” and other dingbats. The bigger the screen, the
more detail there is, the harder it is to locate these controls.
Besides, most people tend to concentrate more on the content they are
developing rather than touring the interface. But, just as any good
photographer will always look all around the image in the viewfinder to
find distracting objects, with software, you need to look beyond the
content and at all the surrounding controls and symbols. Try them. See
what they do, but make sure you’ve saved anything your working on before
exploring and experimenting.
Other examples of clickable Disclosure Triangles and arrowheads
Take a look at the example above – from Photoshop Elements. This is
just one detail from a far corner of the main application window. These
little Disclosure Triangles – they could be filled or look like open
arrowheads – can disclose pop-up lists of choices or they could be used
to display side panels which may normally be hidden.
Some apps will activate disclosure triangles when you have resized
the main application window in such a way that some buttons or other
graphic elements become hidden.
This is the right edge of Safari. The double arrowhead indicates more bookmarks are available
Take Safari, for example. If you add website bookmarks to Safari’s Favorites Bar,
eventually they drop off the right end no matter how large your Safari
window is. When this happens, you can still get to those bookmark
entries by clicking on the little double-disclosure arrowhead which
appears on the right edge of the Favorites Bar the instant there is no
space left for a bookmark to appear there.
Remember, these triangles and arrows – of all shapes and sizes –
are not specks of Cheetos on your greasy screen. These are indicators of
something hidden, and generally something useful to you. Just click on
them, already!
Incidentally, for those of you who like terminology trivia, clicking
on Disclosure Triangles to reveal something is called “twisting open”
and vice-versa: “twisting closed.” In fact, in many instances, a
right-pointing triangle will indicate a closed state, but by clicking on
it, it twists open a panel or pop-up menu, and the triangle turns
downward-pointing.
