Another observation which may help:
- I made an edit in note “A.”
- I switched to note “B” to make another edit.
- Clicking my insertion point in B and pressing “return” elicited the jumping behavior already described. The cursor jumped up a few lines in B and added a new line above where I had intended. All this is as before.
- Here’s the new observation: Typing cmd-z (to undo the jump and insertion) in B, took me back to A!
- When I returned to B I saw that the “damage” in B had indeed been undone, but why send me all the way back to note A?
- I can toggle “undo” and “redo” and the behaviors just described are repeated.
This unexpected jump between notes has happened several times before and it’s very disorienting. If I’m not paying close attention, I lose track of where I was. Moreover, it momentarily causes me to worry that some large part of my Agenda database has suddenly been altered or deleted, although when I get back to where I was everything still seems to be there.
But, then again, how would I know if it wasn’t? How would I know if something really had been inadvertently changed? The whole point of an app like Agenda is to keep track of histories and details that my own memory is too crowded to retain. I’m relying on it — utterly — to remember things for me. If that app-based memory becomes corrupted, how would I know?
That’s why it’s so important for applications like Agenda to behave in predictable ways. It’s not just the reliability of the app — which may be 100% — that matters. It’s also the user’s experience of reliability that matters. It’s possible for a user to lose faith in an app, even though it hasn’t really failed in its essential functions.
I’m not saying I’m ready to give up — I have too much invested in Agenda for that — just that it’s psychologically important to me to get this fixed.