By far the most irritating tool in Fireworks CS3 is the text tool, and this is in part because of the behavior of the caret. (The caret is the the vertical, flashing bar that serves as the pointer for entering text.)
The caret causes two big problems:
- It blinks very slowly. It's on for a full second, then invisible for a full second. During the second that it's off, you have no indication of where the insertion point is.
- Upon clicking to insert text, or upon pressing an arrow key to move the caret, the caret restarts its on/off cycle with the caret off, and you have to wait for it to turn on again before you can see where the caret landed.
Thus, each time you hit the arrow key to reposition the caret, you have to wait a full second to see where the caret landed. Each time you click in a field to move the caret, you have to wait for a second to see if it's in the right place. Worse, while hitting the arrow key repeatedly to move the caret several characters, the caret is completely invisible. To see where it is, you have to stop for a full second, and - once reoriented to its current location - continue moving the caret.
The following easy fixes would improve the usability of the text tool profoundly:
- Change the blink rate of the caret. maybe 1/2 second on, 1/8 second off.
- Upon changing the caret insertion point, either with the mouse or the keyboard, restart the on/off cycle with the caret on. This way the caret will be fully visible the entire time you are moving it.
