I understand the modal dialog pattern.
These Fibery “modals” generally do not adhere to the “Explicit Save is required, or else closing it cancels all changes” behavior, and their modal status doesn’t seem to serve any purpose. And sometimes they don’t behave like modals at all – in my above example, regular-clicking a Table View cell DOES close the sidebar AND execute the click (which is what I want, only with more consistency).
Modals are a PITA if not actually required. I would much rather have them be active, independent windows/panes – and hopefully that’s where we’re headed with Multi-panel context-preserving navigation.
Either way, once you’ve accepted that clicking outside the thing dismisses it, it’s not a stretch to dismiss it and activate your click-target in a single operation.
Personally I think the hit to usability (the double-takes of having to click twice) far outweighs the benefit of adhering to a standard modal pattern that that’s not serving any purpose. Innovators create new UI/UX patterns every day, and I’m glad they are, else we’d all be using Windows 3.1 UI.