Have you ever noticed that there is a short delay (about a second) when entering the “edit text mode” in Finder, Mail or iTunes? When clicking on an unselected item for the first time, a selection event occurs. When waiting a short period (don’t double click) and clicking again on the text (!), after about a second the text field to edit the text appears.

I’m planning to integrate this behavior into my own application (at this stage I’m not sure if this will replace the double-clicking) and I tried to find an answer to why this delay happens, but so far my search only turned up very wage answers. Through my own testing I found out that it feels “wrong” when the text field appears immediately. A result of being “trained” by Apple that it should appear after about a second?