Slashdot Mirror
On the Widespread Misuse of the Mouse
An anonymous reader writes "Recently launched blog "The New Interface Advocate," has an entry about how mice are being applied to situations they are intrinsically poorly suited for. It also has an interesting proposal for how to keep most of the current paradigm of GUIs and still take advantage of the other control devices, such as the keyboard."
As their webserver smolders in ruins and I lack the credentials to apply it to the story myself...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I know, i know CLI is there but CLI browsers are no match for GUI browsers sadly.
Moreover i would love to use keyboard keys for everything and for those who feel like me shifting to a more keyboard centric environment, try fluxbox. Wicked cool with all things in place, plus it is fast too, not to mention custom ways you can mould it to.
-- "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" - TAE --
And here I though the story was about the abuse of medical mice.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Well, this is a really interesting article that, I must admit, I'm guilty of just following the crowd in this respect of allowing--no, relying on the mouse to do everything. It's very interesting and refreshing to read about someone suggesting something new and intuitive about user input to a computing device.
... and I think he mentions the issues that would be associated with subselections. I tried to imagine the GIMP using this in my mind but the submenus would get out of hand. For example, you would like to use script-fu? Well, there's two submenus under that of a dynamic allotment of add ons that I can structure in directories however I want. Tough to deal with stuff like that.
However, I found his premise inaccessible and, after reading the first part of this two part idea, I couldn't come up with a concrete advantage for using his method. At first, it seems like this is an argument for speed though I doubt rendering all those options in an overlay to display to the user would be much more efficient than a mouse click on a menu bar. The real estate gain is the obvious definitive advantage his system would have over everything I've used. However, the user must first know how to bring up the options overlay
I guess what I would have preferred in a blog like this is a more comprehensive analysis of trade offs when going against the grain in UI input methods. For example, using method A provides you with the benefits of speed & real estate saving but may be inaccessible for some users who are very used to the point and click paradigm and find new learning curves challenging or scary (there are people like that out there). In my opinion, keeping it as simple as possible and knowing your audience are the two biggest things to remember when designing a UI and I think this blog raises an excellent point that we shouldn't be afraid with re-examining the window system in operating systems but I don't think this is applicable in all situations.
Anyone out there (Edward Tufte students, psychologists, etc.) ever do a trade study on these features for their applications? Being a "form" ignorant engineer something like that would be most valuable to me.
My work here is dung.
I know of one misuse, is the overuse of popup lists in forms, especially when entering dates (one popup for month, one for day, and another for year)
When people are entering alphanumeric data give them as much keyboard access as possible, leaving the keyboard just adds to the entry time, stress injuries as well as potential for typing errors (reorienting to typing position after mouse usage.)
The second is popups instead of checklists and radio/selection lists, which add to the mouse gymnastics to select one or more options from a single line field.
It may be easier to make the popups (unfortunately many tutorials use date popups as an early example of web programming), either way you still have to validate the information, so take the extra effort to out in a generic text box, checklist or selection list and add a few more lines of validation code.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I skimmed the article, and I didn't see one other reason why I think everything that can be done with a mouse should also be doable by a keyboard, even stuff that is more efficient to do with a mouse: scripting.
Generally, scripting and automating mouse actions is very difficult. Scripting and automating keyboard actions is trivial.
I think the problem is that people often think because something is new and modern in terms of software that a mouse is the best way to use it. Things like EVE - the visual traffic analysis tool have keyboard options like games, but how many people just potter around the GUI with the mouse when the keyboard is more effective.
Apps should take a leaf out of the gamers handbook imo.
Keyboard ftw!
page 1 and page 2
When I read that in TFA, I swear the first thought in my mind was -- he's going to reinvent Emacs?
Go somewhere random
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
I hate the mouse, except as a children's/newbie's teaching tool. If I've got desk space for a mousepad, I want to use that for my display. And why do all that (carpal tunnel inviting) work to move a virtual pointer?
I prefer the trackpad. But why don't I have a touchscreen with stability and accuracy already? There's no reason for a "pointer metaphor" device when I can just move the actual pointer.
Give me a touchscreen and maybe a little rubber pointer fingercap, if I'm freaked out by smudges, or need to see the pointed pixel under my fingertip. Or give me an antiglare screen that doesn't collect smudges, and put a rock-solid pointer just above my fingertip. Put some bumpy, but invisible, texture on the screen, and we've finally graduated from Xerox PARC into the 20th Century.
Hey Apple, can you finally redeem us from the nightmarish little box you cursed us with when you tempted us out of the terminal?
--
make install -not war
...run by someone with no credentials, who couldn't even be bothered to make his own blog template.
He blathers on about some "proposal," which basically involves popping up menus based on modifier keys. Then he says "Without further adieu." This is a worthless blog, and a worthless post, and a new low for slashdot being used to jack up hit counters.
I know there a few situations where they are one of the better input devices... but what i would like to see is a self reconfiguraing keyboard (maybe just a big oled/lcd touch display) that rearrages its layout for the application at hand. For example-- if you were using photoshop it would place a tool menu, a drawing square and a couple other options on the keyboard-- if you switched a word processor it would become a keyboard with some formatting options. no need for menus-- you could hit a "menu button" on the "keyboard" and have the keyboard change into a bunch of menu options... It would be a lot like LCARS. :)
Is it just me or does this "new" system look a lot like the control system employed by Emacs (and even vi), but with a colorful overlay?
Rankmaniac 2010
Just two words to save the mouse: Mouse Gestures. The author tells us how limited mouse is in terms "muscle memory", yet he doesn't know that mouse isn't only for clicking. Mouse gestures can, and are performed automatically from muscle memory. I've learned a copule for Opera, and then I had to LEARN to NOT APPLY mouse gesture (down-right) to close Explorer windows.
The worse thing that happened to Usenet was the web browser and mouse. The entire web browser paradigm applied to Usenet just grates my nerves to no end. The only way you can navigate and control anything is with the mouse. I'd rather use trn anytime over any web browser. There are other issues with browsers as applied to Usenet, but this one really gets me irked. Why can't a web browser keyboard input for navigation, everything is on buttons and has to be mouse clicked.
That, and really good voice recognition would let me do everything I use a computer for except writing code.
For writing code, there's no good alternative (that I've seen) to having both hands on the keyboard.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
Was I the only one who immediate thought about abused gerbils and duct tape?
I deal with a lot of different vendor products used for call routing and IVR applications. One thing that's happened over the past 10 years is the move from text scripts to proprietary GUI based programming tools. I'm talking drag-n-drop blocks that perform specific functions which "hook" together by dragging lines between them.
Generally, this is to make configuring the systems more accessible to people not properly trained (or trained at ALL) in programming. ie. They're suppose to be good for writing error-free scripts. Unfortunately, these poor tools in no way reduce the number of bugs that find their way into the system.
Additionally, they also have the following draw-backs:
* Absolutely no error handling (try, catch, etc.)
* No way to program function calls....once you choose a path, there's no going back...this results in TONS of duplicate code.
* No way to know exactly what those blocks are doing under-the-hood.
* You're limited by the functionality of the blocks provided by the vendor.
* Many difficulties with source-control systems and build-and-release procedures.
* Don't even get me started on what it's like to debug with these stupid things....
Just this morning I was paged at 5:45am because someone made a change to a script. It took me an hour to find the problem because I had to zoom in and out, trying to get a feel of the layout, looking a block properties to see what's changed, etc. It turned out the lines connecting the day-of-the-week block were set correctly: they had the Monday line connected to Sunday's code.
Talk about a fubar'd system.
They should be outlawed.
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
The only argument he makes for why you would practically want to do this is to add 10-25% more screen space for content. Not good enough.
Keyboard shortcuts are far better for daily use, but they're a barrier to entry. Until I learn the shortcuts, I use the buttons. Yes, forcing me to use the shortcuts would force me to learn them more quickly and increase my productivity. But it would also add ramp up time to using the application and piss me off.
There are a lot of apps I rarely use. I like the buttons. I don't want to learn those apps. I just want to get what I need done. So I click on the icons and surf through the menus with my mouse. For those applications I use a lot, the shortcuts are there.
I think the this guy only shows that:
1) We should use shortcuts more often.
2) Applications should give advanced users the ability to turn off all toolbars (most of them do and most of us don't.)
Besides vi and Emacs, who else remembers Wordperfect, Wordstar, etc. The good old days when you do everything with a keyboard, and keyboard commands. There's a menu bar that you can call up and out comes the menus. You can also memorise the good ol' keyboard commands, and save loads of time. And of course, you don't waste time rendering the page nicely. That happens when you print out. :)
Well, those days are gone... and this "new" interface is nostalgically reminding me of those days. IMO, it's a fantastic idea!
There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those that know binary, and those that don't.
It was called vi. [ctl]s isn't much more efficient than [esc]:s
I like the idea of making as many commands as possible doable with the keyboard, but half the point to a gui is the ability to use the mouse instead of having to memorize a bunch of cryptic commands. Just keep the most used commands accessible by keyboard, and leave the rest to be hit with the mouse. Yeah, mice are kind of crappy for an input device, but redesigning the mouse will work better than redesigning the interface. The reason vi and emacs and other command-based editors aren't in common use outside of the geek world is because no one wants to do that except geeks.
The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The mouse is simply a proxy by which the user indicates choices. It was just a matter of time before the need for a proxy was removed completely. Touch screens accomplish this. Problem is, no one, clear good method of using touch as the primary input method has presented itself...until now.
What will become clear in time is the role the iPhone will play in the death of the mouse. The version of OS X on the iPhone, not Leopard by the way, is the next big thing - get on board now and enjoy the ride.
thing that came to my mind when I read the words "misuse" and "mouse" was farfour mouse, a true abomination.
real keyboard enthusiasts use dwm
WTF was that non-humorous cruft? Frist Proster, lemme tell ya, you'd have been better off to post using only your mouse; y'know, blank.
Wants to go back to the 'good old days' where you'd have to tab 20 times to get to the text box you want (enevitably you'd press it 21 times and have to start over), have to remember different key combinations for every program (most keep the basics the same but advanced functions usually are different) and generally do most graphical activities slower?
Users like icons and using mouse for most activities because it's easier, safer and there's less risk of doing the wrong thing by accident. Who here hasn't experienced the frustration of losing 20 minutes of typing or resetting a connection because they pressed 'backspace' to try and delete some text only for a browser to go back a page?
More importantly is the horrid misuse of gerbils....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Now that we've got that settled about mice, how about the widespread misuse in CSS style sheets of "body {font-size: 62.5%;}". I set my font size so that I can read the body text on pages which don't pull that crap, and now every blogger in the world has their body size set to 62.5% because that was the default that came with their TypePressBlogger thingy. So now I have to zoom the text on blog pages and Digg, and then un-zoom it when I go back to "normal" pages.
If you want your headline text bigger, then freaking set the headline font size to greater than 100%!
Admittedly, this wasn't such a problem until I got a MacBook Pro, with its higher DPI screen than the previous generation. But 62.5% also wasn't such a fad back then either.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382932/
Try entering text with a mouse sometime... it goes something like this:
1. Scan document for instance of the letter you want to type, scrolling as necessary.
2. Highlight, right-click, hover to "Copy", click.
3. Scroll back to your insertion point, right-click, hover to "Paste", click again.
Man is that slow and inefficient!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
From TFA: "Now, consider that without on-screen controls, the entire screen could be devoted to content."
I read this as I notice that the article only fills maybe 25% of my screen, due to some column-size constraint placed upon the page by the blog software. How about allowing me to make use of the interface I already have before getting all nit-picky about menubars and buttons taking up relatively minute amounts of screen real-estate?
I am MuchTall
....35 comments and not a single gaffa tape joke.
/. remains
phew, my faith in
You know there are professions that have been in use for ages that require you to use your arms all day. Blacksmithing, weaving, farming, manufacturing, etc, etc. You would learn to do it, just as you have learned not to do it. Besides, if it was laid down on the desk, it would be like ... writing, you know, that people have done for ages. Maybe we could get some Franciscan Monks to teach us how to hold a pen for 8 hours. Yeesh.
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
I doubt most folks would disagree with that for basic word processing, power computer users (which includes 98% of /. readers) often prefer memorizing tons of secret key strokes over using the mouse. Duh. But for folks that don't live and breath these apps, mouse-driven menus at least let folks easily access EVERYTHING.
The issue is that it's inefficient to switch between multiple input devices so one should design GUIs that allow users to go with the flow rather than forcing them to constantly switch in the middle of their workflow. But the article obsesses with trying to argue that the keyboard is far superior to the mouse rather than saying the keyboard is better for applications that focus on text entry.
Try creating Powerpoint slides without a mouse - or navigating the web - or playing games - or anything except for text-entry centric apps. It's a ridiculous premise to argue that the mouse is obsolete.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So you'd prefer to have to lift up your arms all day to control your computer. After a day of work, I bet you'd go home with your arm muscles hurting. And cool as it looks, the transparent screen doesn't help much either.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Idea 1: Hide the non-essential icons/user interface tools behind a control key
That idea is brilliant in my opinion. Take the Internet Browser. When reading the pages on the internet you do NOT need the three or four or more menu bars. When you add in the file set, my links, the back etc., the address bar, and any google/yahoo/ etc. menu bar, that can add up to quite a lot of space not always neccessary. I have two hands, I see no reason why we can not implement his concept of HIDING that all away until you press the Control key.
Idea 2: Making all those controls key controlled. Now, I am in favor of more/better key commands. But honestly, I see no reason not to also button up those same commands. If we write "Alt-S: Save document" then why not draw a line around it and allow a mouse click as an alternate way to save the document.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
For me, the quickest path is a nice fine blend of keyboard & mouse. I find myself using the keyboard much more often than the mouse though.
The one thing I realized I can't live without is the mouse wheel. That saves quite a bit of clicking over to the scrollbar arrows, etc. Sadly, it's not supported everywhere, even in 2007. Windows' Remote Desktop often filters it out on scrollbars, which makes kitty unhappy.
Sadly, my middle mouse button(scrollwheel) doesn't close firefox tabs in my newer Logitech & MS mouse like my old MS Intellimouse Explorer used to. that saved me a lot of rt click & close tab actions. The mice made today have a much stiffer wheel that doesn't adapt to your finger over time.
it made me chuckle a bit
I will agree that mousing can make apps easier to learn, but not necessarily easier to use. I've seen some well-designed CUI (character-based) designs that allowed great user efficiency. It just took a little longer to learn. For example, finding something in a list of titles. I would rather let the computer do the searching rather than my eyes, for I am not a speed reader. I would rather type "f abc" at a command line, which means "find the substring "abc", than read each entry.
Table-ized A.I.
I think you should drop the sax solo at the end.
I used a trackball from around 1998 till 2006 to get around issues of RSI, however whilst I cannot talk up the benefit of this (and a natural keyboard) enough, after discovering the G5 laser mouse I'm now someone who's gone back to using mice. The reason is an incredible dot pitch which at max resolution lets me move the cursor across three screens (1600+1920+1600) in less than the width of a hand.
ISO certified == THX certified
Everybody know you are supposed to use a Gerbil. Here are detailed instructions.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
I'm still waiting for them to develop the system that tracks eye movements, and just put left click / right click on the keyboard. Until, i'll be using my mouse, which I had to start using after getting my butt kicked in quake II...
The problem with your suggestion is that Powerpoint is designed to be used with a mouse.
Actually, I hurt my hand recently and was using my PC one-handed. The solution I found I preferred is to go 100% mouse and use the virtual keyboard in Win 2k - it's actually pretty good! Surprised me. I play FPS games and even the odd ported lightgun game (House of the Dead etc) with a mouse, so I'm probably a lot better than average at hitting lots of small targets fast, but I think anyone who's familiar with a mouse could get to an adequate 20 words-per-minute with a day of practice. I'd be tiring to write an essay like that but it's fine for email.
The other odd thing is that Ubuntu and Fedora both apparently lack a virtual keyboard... I hate to see my favourite OS pwned by MS, particularly since Ubuntu is supposed to be the accessible one.
p.s. Mods, he was joking...
Keyboard is very good for saving time when there are complex applications with lots of different tasks. With more than 100 keys on it, it is not efficient to ask the user to go through menus and submenus. The learning curve is more steep, but the results are better. Mice are good for simple applications with few tasks, and obviously for anything that can take advantage from an axis movement, e.g. graphics. Blender is a good example of a software requiring a hand on the keyboard and the other on the mouse, and takes full advantage of both.
CTRL + F Funny ---> I had you!!!
Oooh. We've witnessed the birth of a new kind of music: Compu-Emo. The bands will have pocket protectors and cry about teenage spirit. I give it one week to die in agony.
There is another solution for the programmatically minded...
:) ) are controlled by ~150K of autohotkey scripts.O ,Apps-V,Return
:)
Automation scripts, of various types, can be triggered by keyboard, mouse, joystick, etc.
The overlay type system suggested in the article could be easily implemented outside of a program by a relatively simple script.
On my box, common actions (and some not so common
This has saved me immeasurable amounts of mouse fiddling, and general GUI time-wasting.
Why spend half your day navigating through folders to open something in an editor, by repeatedly clicking and dragging, when you can literally (on my box) do something like the following:
Win-Alt-X,X,Shift-T,Tab,,Ctrl-C,Win-Alt-E,C,Ctrl-
Even something as simple as assigning key-combos to certain folders will save you having to reach for the mouse every five minutes.
If you're like me, you might even have a dedicated key combo to open the hotkey configuration file in your favourite editor...
There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face - Ben Williams
I could be wrong, but it seems to me that this is all about the way he defines "discrete" and "continuous" tasks. It looks rather like he is simply re-defining as many GUI actions (note he does not define those parameters exactly either), as requiring discrete (and not continuous, fine, control), and then surprising us all with the idea that a keyboard is better for all that "discreteness."
Are not most of these tasks accomplished *either* in discrete steps *or* in less linear ways? Isn't that the entire point of having two different methods of input? (mouse and keyboard)
Additionally, a keyboard centric interface would be a major problem for the "average" people out there. These are the people that basically comprise the computer revolution we have all been obsessing about in the last 20 years. The point and click interface is these users main method for entering the computer world and without it, many simply would not be able to do so. If computers were still only used by geeks and techs, there wouldn't be a need for the mouse of course. On the other hand if people had wings, there would not be much use for automobiles either. So what?
By way of example, typing is itself a fairly easy skill to master, but the vast majority of people do not do so. Even with it's promotion in high schools around the world, *most* people find it abstruse and unwieldy, at least when trying to learn it. Once conquered, it is indeed a powerful method, but it's certainly not intuitive by any means. If there is that much of an entry barrier to learning simple typing, how much higher is the barrier for the interface experiment mentioned here?
Even if that high school teacher had a whip, and threatened expulsion for those unwilling to learn this new keyboard interface, I doubt that much more than 20% of the school would ever learn it. More importantly, these kids would end up *hating* computers and keyboards with a passion, creating even further barriers to adoption or use.
It seems to me that regardless of arguments like this cropping up from time to time, the old division is still as true as it ever was. Geeks use the keyboard, everyone else (including your mum), will still need the mouse, and most of us are in the middle using whatever seems to get the job done for us personally, the fastest.
You are told to 'click' on images in the article to see examples of this mouseless interface...
Mouse is more efficient for some things. Keyboard others. I like to use both, thanks.
How about all the trouble with constantly having to switch between the keyboard and mouse? I'd like to see GUI's not only support better keyboard, but tuned to reduce switching between different input devices as well!
There's barely any skin left on the ... uhm... device... (pointing device?)
If you've ever watch an excel expert their hands almost never leave the keyboard. Excel is really well designed such that almost all the commands are easily accessible from keyboard shortcuts and power users quickly come up to speed on the commands. The interface for excel is extremely well thought out making it easy for beginners to be guided through the options and power users to be able to blaze through. Excel is perhaps one of the best designed and most usable programs ever. (The OSS alternatives for excel are good for basic lists and trival spreadsheets. Excel is one reason that Open Office is unlikely to succeed in corporate environments.)
The misused mouse, part 1: The story of the mouse's decline
Now, I am by no means hoping to abolish the mouse. Its price to performance ratio is unmatched, and the best alternative pointing device (the tablet) can't be found for much less than an order of magnitude greater expense: hard to justify for the relatively small performance edge it offers. What I do wish to decry is the enormous reliance on the mouse to cover every possible user interface situation, failing to take advantage of other, better designs. Years of lazy design and low opinions of the user's desire (even ability) to learn have left us with a constant testing of Fitts' Law for such trivial tasks as saving, broken paradigms (what about a real-world button relates to replacing an old document irrevocably with the current one?), and a user experience that is more patronizing than productive.
Let's start with a few key ideas about interface devices. The keyboard is quantized (that is, it consists of discrete units of input, like a piano's notes), while the mouse is continuous (its input ranges without breaks across the entire screen, like the strings of a violin which cover every possible pitch in their range).
Now, think about the actions you perform on your computer in a given day. You type, save, open, close, select, resize, navigate, refresh, cancel, approve, and perform scores of other actions.
Now divide the tasks into groups. Which ones consist of discrete actions, and which require fine, continuous control? I'll be generous (and rude to my fellow console text editors--I know vi/emacs can both comfortably rely on keyboard input only) and say text selection and input positioning, color selection, drawing, and most (spatial) navigation is most naturally, perhaps even most effectively, performed with a continuous input device such as a mouse.
Now, for the discrete actions: type, save, open, close, refresh, cancel, approve, and most of the other basic actions. In fact, I'd say many users could count scores of daily activities that are discrete, whereas breaking a dozen continuous actions would be a challenge. (Let's put aside all window management like switching between windows, resizing them, moving them, and so on. These mostly seem continuous but I'll explain in a later post why they're usually not.)
Now, which of those actions are new users taught to do with the discrete input device? Typing.
Now, advanced users have memorized ways to do a large fraction of (or, if they're fanatical, all) discrete actions with their discrete-input device. If you're looking for evidence of the superiority of a keyboard over a mouse in most situations, look at these users. There is a strong correlation between how much time a person uses computers (especially professionally) and how much they switch away from the mouse whenever readily possible. I challenge you to find a hundredth as many IT professionals who prefer the mouse as who prefer the keyboard when either will perform a given action.
Further advantage of a keyboard over the mouse lies in "muscle memory." (For those who might not be familiar with the term, it's the re-enforced skill of repeated actions--and the reason we can speak, write, type, and a host of other skills, without having to consciously perform every muscle contraction in careful coordination.) This, however, isn't because it's quantized, but rather because our position on the keyboard is generally absolute, whereas whenever we grab the mouse the cursor could be anywhere. In fact, there are only five pixels we can hit with our eyes closed--the one we're on plus the four corners. That's less than 1/150,000th of the median computer screen's real estate that can be associated with muscle memory. The keyboard, on the other hand, can be entirely memorized (or close to it) in the course of general computer use. With combinations of control, alt, and shift, and even the more modestly skilled typists have literally hundreds of key combinations they could hit rapidly, even with their eyes closed (an
...but I couldn't turn or aim quickly enough and kept getting pwn3t.
As a long time user of utilities like Quicksilver, I have to say that I agree 100% with the superiority of the keyboard. It's much faster to find just about anything on my computer by using quicksilver that it would be using the standard interface. For example, if I want to look up a phone number I have two options: 1) Open a new window and navigate to the Applications folder, double click on Address Book, wait for it to launch, and type the name in the search field. 2)Press Ctrl-Space, type a few letters of the name, press the right arrow key, select the number I want, and press enter to make it show up in large numbers on the screen. If I want an action other than the default (large type) I can press tab, type the first few letters of the desired action ("co" for "Copy to Clipboard"), and press enter. Launching programs is even quicker: Ctrl-space, "sa", enter. Safari opens. It has a bit of a learning curve, but once you get used to them it's a pain to use computers without easy keyboard access. I consider any Mac without Quicksilver to be broken.
From part I of the article:
Let's put aside all window management like switching between windows...He chose to put it aside, but we don't have to. Personally, I find it flabbergasting how few people know about "ALT-TAB". This exists, in some form or another, on every window management system I've used, from Gnome to whatever Windows 95 and onward. Yes, the taskbar is useful as a readily visible list of open programs, but I don't think I'd ever click it to switch focus.
The second thing that never fails to surprise me is how few people use tab to navigate between fields on fill-out forms, especially in an HTML context, but that's been adequately covered in other posts.
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
... try MenuMaster on MacOS X. It's Spotlight for the menu items. I can't live without it. Nice and clean unlike QuickSilver which get very complicated when you try to do too many things in one place. Spotlight + MenuMaster and you are all set.
I would say fortunately.
Instead of a mouse that you drag around, what if you had a similar-looking device that you could place to either the right or left of your keyboard, whichever was more comfortable, such that whenever you grab it as you would a mouse (perhaps via a switch on the top of the enclosure that gets pushed in by the top of your palm), it enables an eye-tracking facility that is built into the monitor and would cause the pointer to follow where your eyes are looking at on screen? You would just hold your hand still and move your eyes to where you want the cursor to go and it follows your eye motions.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
...are you sure it's not maybe the mice abusing humans that's really the problem here?
Benji may just be experimenting again.
...and the best alternative pointing device (the tablet) can't be found for much less than an order of magnitude greater expense...
My Medion A4-sized graphics tablet comes in at £25 from the local Aldi, which is £5 less than the Saitek GM-3200 "gaming" laser mouse I bought. Works like a charm.
09F9 1102 9D74 E35B D841 56C5 6356 88C0
Just remove any options from the screen and put everything in the context menu.
You want to save? right-click on the document, save.
You want to change the color of the text? select the text, right-click, change the color.
You want to apply a new style? select the text, right-click, select style, apply.
You want to load another document? right-click on the MDI form empty space, select 'open' and load the document.
etc.
Maybe Micky wouldn't be so abused....
I don't think Mr. Barnes considers all the possible ramifications of HIDs. Much of his argument in favor of keyboards assumes a perfectly functioning human memory; completely aside from an ability or inability to touch-type, the ability to *remember* keyboard shortcuts is critical to succesful use of a keyboard in that fashion. Not all humans have a perfectly functional memory. It also depends upon how many different applications a person uses, and with what frequency; someone who uses dozens of applications and many of them infrequently will not be able to remember keyboard shortcuts with any reliability. If that person also possessed ADD traits including a poor memory, the problem would be magnified substantially.
Mr. Barnes' arguments dismiss the existence of both power-user geeks who use many dozens of applications and people with ADD and poor memory. Unless Mr. Barnes wants to put up the cash to buy everyone in those classes one of the fancy expensive new programmable OLED keyboards and then personally invest the time to ensure its perfect cooperation with every application, he might be better off keeping his HID opinions to himself.
There were times in the DOS days when you could go between the fields with up/down arrows. Very effective and user friendly. And enter would enter the data on this field and move to the next one instead of submitting the form. I think Fox-Pro used it, Clipper for DOS used it, Volkov/Norton commander used it. Far commander still uses it. So it was much like using the typewriter:
[data data data] ENTER
[data data data] ENTER
[data for the last field] ENTER- saves record/submits form, asks if you really want to save the data, etc.
Only later with introduction of Windows tab key got used to move between field and we needed godawful unintuitive shift-tab to move back. And Enter key was almost forgotten when entering forms, because if you hit it before entering all the needed data, you get in trouble. And it is the key that was supposed to be hit very often and designed to be easy to reach, unlike the tab key.
And text mode interfaces of the day were quite friendly. For example in Volkov/Norton commander (and some other software) there was a key bar that said what would each of F1..F10 keys do. If you press and hold CTRL, they would change and say what would CTRL+F1..F10 keys do. Same with alt, shift, etc. This was 10x more useful than any toolbars, and now most of Fxx keys are not used unless you work with an application for years and know all the hotkeys by heart.
And don't get me started on advantages of 2 panel file managers vs many windows drag & drop. But that is another topic.
I think it is possible to design and implement an efficient and user friendly interface that would use much more keyboard and much less mouse. It was almost done for crying out loud. But then it was forgotten because along came the shiny stuff. And Linux GUIs suffer from the mouse-clickines just as much as Windows ones, maybe worse.
--Coder
For the X Windows set: if you want to try an interesting window manager that applies some of these ideas, check out suckless.org. I am a big fan of WMII. highly configurable, no wasted screen real estate, great for widescreen.
Read the book "The Humane Interface" for a comprehensive review of trade-offs between mouse and keyboard control.
And welcome to the world of Archy. This experimental interface designed by Apple creator Jef Raskin has almost all of the ideas from the article's proposal, plus many more.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
I found that to be a very interesting idea. As I'm on a computer all day, I try and do as much as I can on the keyboard; it just seems faster to me.
Anyone have any tips (can it even be done?) to browse the web via Firefox almost entirely by keyboard? I already use keyboard shortcuts extensively, and when browsing pages (ie, Slashdot), I'll focus the window, and pagedown/scroll down to read the comments. But I find I still have to use the mouse to click links and such. Even on this form, after I type, if I want to submit the form I have to tab through the focus on the controls until I get to the submit button; it's easier to mouse to it.
If I'm reading a page, and see a link, I know I can search for that link, but the searching in FF starts at the top, and I lose my place. Is there a way to target a visible link on the current scroll position? I also find (when using page down to scroll) that if I go to another tab, and then back again, I have to click with the mouse to focus the page before the arrow keys work to navigate the page.
I've seen some greasemonkey scripts and whatnot that make using gmail/greader more keyboard friendly. I think it'd be great if you could navigate the web entirely using your keyboard, but still have the "modern" browser. Why do I have to click the play button on Youtube? Why should I have to use the mouse at all?
Warning, excessive and reckless noun-to-verb transforms included. "Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin and Hobbes
In his book "Tog On Interface", Bruce Tognazzini quotes some research done at Apple and elsewhere (Stanford?) where they tested actual speed of mousing vs. keyboarding, and users' perception of same. Bottom line was people thought mousing was faster, but they were wrong. The effort required to remember keyboard commands, and typing them, gets perceived as more time, whereas the lesser effort of mousing seems like less time but actually takes longer.
The learning curve for keyboard commands is definitely steeper though. If you don't already know them and have to look them up, or are just not familiar and take a long time to remember them, then the keyboard is slower.
The mouse isn't used because it's faster, it's used because it's easier. It takes very little learning, and almost no cognitive effort. That's the whole philosophy behind the GUI, of which the mouse is an integral part.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
It is annoying when you can't use your keyboard to input alphanumeric data. It is also annoying when you can't use the mouse to copy a link, or cut-n-paste text from some dialogue box. Moral of the story, make sure your interface supports mice AND keyboards. There is a number of disabilities that can make it difficult to use a keyboard, or a mouse. Some people prefer the keyboard, some prefer the mouse. Many window managers got it right. Take xfwm4 as an example. You can switch virtual desktops using ctrl+right/left , by clicking the little widget in the taskbar, or by moving the mouse to the edge of the screen. Furthermore, since you can rebind the keyboard short cuts you have even more options available. That is how it should be done. That way I can switch desktops easily with my mouse, and my keyboard loving mouse hating friend can rebind his 300key-super-ergonomic multimedia keyboard to do it for him.
Having just input configuration, no matter how brilliant it is, will always suck. Why can't more applications give the ability to configure keypresses and menus, rather than trying to make up just another brilliant scheme that few people would like and that no other app would adopt? I want fully configurable key presses, tool bars, menus, tool panes, etc. Everything. Mr. Barnes should be able to configure whatever app for his bizarre menu idea if he wants. And if I want to put the six actions that I want on a separate touchscreen display as huge buttons that I can punch with my nose, then let me do that too. A few apps have decent enough support for this, but it is far from common. Do the standard widget libraries just not easily support this, or is it that programmers have no idea how to use them? Or, most likely, both? Firefox, seriously, is that really the best you can do?
Honestly I've never been a big fan of the keyboard. I use my mouse whenever I can over the keyboard, whether it's at work or at home for games. I can see why this person does value the keyboard though from the article he states "I challenge you to find a hundredth as many IT professionals who prefer the mouse as who prefer the keyboard when either will perform a given action." And there you have it - he's thoughts and opinions are coming from the point of someone who's job really doesn't require much in the way of mouse. Now let's replace a word here and there...
"I challenge you to find a hundredth as many Graphic Artists who prefer the keyboard as who prefer the mouse when either will perform a given action."
In actuallity their are a lot of different mice/trackballs out on the market that are cheep inexpensive and can have their buttons mapped to do a lot of tasks. While I may still use Apple+S to save my work, I'll always use my mouse to click the center text icon, rather than hit Shft+Apple+C - but that's just me and what I like.
Ave Molech Setting
Here is a true story about the real mice. My friend worked part-time at Dana Farber Cancer Institute while studying at medical school. He told me all mice and rats experiments had to be properly documented, to insure no unnecessary cruelty was done to the animals. At the end all mice and rats were killed with gilliotine (quick and painless). I remember meeting him one day and he was a bit upset. He told me the last night air conditioner broke down and all their mice and rats died. So much for prevention the cruelty ...
Back in the 80s, when mice were being used in the mainstream, I saw people instinctively picking them up and placing them on the screen to make the computer work.
Flashforward about 20 years, and the local Borders kiosk needed a sign to remind people to use the trackball/clicker, and that the screen wasn't a touchscreen.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
The Best of Both Worlds
The battle between gui and cli is a problem because of the stand alone keyboard and mouse. When pointing is integrated into the keyboard, the battle between the gui and the cli is a non issue and goes away.
From my research for a PhD in HCI, advanced input technology, and advanced interfaces, I have found the best solution to the gui/cli problem is a hardware solution.
An advanced keyboard that integrates the function and controls of a movable mouse into the keyboard giving the user total control of the computer screen without the user's fingers leaving the home row is the best solution.
The advanced keyboard I have developed and have used daily for the last three years is a keyboard that I can point, click, type, and scroll in any order simultaneously and instantly without taking my fingers off the home row.
I can navigate, transverse, and control up to four 19" screens so far at will. I just point, click, and type. On a spread sheet I can point, click, and type in one easy continuous motion to any cell from any cell.
Financial traders and military users where micro-seconds count are the most likely first adopters of this type of keyboard.
With an advanced keyboard or keyboard of the future, advanced interfaces or interfaces of the future can now be designed.
The interface of the future is an interface that is a personal interface that a user can personalize or customize to their preferences. It is open, os and application neutral, and accommodates gui, cli, and a search box equally. There is no delay or transition time to go from one to the other, you just do it.
We all work differently with our own personal preferences; the interface should not hinder the user and neither should the input hardware. The interface should be transparent or as Rob Pike of AT&T Bell Laboratories states: "simple, comfortable, and unobtrusive."
When the user has choices, they can make their own interface, a personal interface or a myinterface if you will, that suits the way they want to work and not the way they have to work dictated by inflexible default application interfaces. A personal interface is an interface that sits on top of all applications like the microsoft onscreen keyboard.
With a personal interface you make it and have it your way.
Conclusion
The problem between the gui and the cli today is the use of the old stand alone keyboard and mouse configuration.
If you use an advanced integrated keyboard mouse configuration you can use an advanced customizable integrated gui, cli, search interface for increased productivity, performance, and comfort.
from the "father of the perfect keyboard"
Imagine an office full of coders all talking at normal voice-levels trying to get that paren in the right spot. Noisy, eh? Now take it towards the end of the day having that same group of people, all pissed off because the voice control is "really good" but not perfect.
What I loved about AutoCAD (haven't used it since R14) was that you could use the keyboard for selecting any command. I had one hand on the keyboard and the other hand seldom left the tablet. Our university got rid of the tablets and we were stuck with mice, which I didn't like at first but kinda got used to it. The stickiness of the mechanical mice in those days was a major pain compared to the dead accurate placement on a tablet.
With AutoCAD R13 they'd moved into the Windows era and you could put icons on the screen and click them, so even though I lost the convenience of the digitiser, I gained the convenience of not having to look down at it to select commands. But 90% of the things you do in a day's drafting are all accessible by hitting a handful of key combinations at the AutoCAD command line anyway. God it was fast! Does it still have the command line?
I saw some CAD applications that abolished CLI in the rush to adopt Windoze when it first became popular, but I always found a huge reduction in the quality of the user experience when that happened. I'd see users using the buttons and dialogs on the screen, but tabbing around them on the keyboard (because it's faster for repetitive stuff, naturally) instead of using the mouse. Kinda makes you wonder why bother doing away with the CLI.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I'm not advocating voice recognition in crowded spaces...as you point out, it's silly. [OT:I always wondered what the computer in ST:TNG would do if the whole crew started yelling things at the same time]
And, as I said in my post, I'm certainly not saying that people should write *code* via voice recognition. Imagine trying to write C++ by speaking... *shudder*
However, it would be great for my home computer. It would make responding to all my personal e-mail much quicker. Not to mention things like grocery lists, etc.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
I like the end of the article:
Microsoft thought of this, already, but since I ignore them, this is still a notable idea. Besides, won't X have copied all of Vista's useful features within the year? Then I can claim they were listening to me!
If you can't find a real troll, just mod down whoever you don't agree with!
with some exceptions.
Anything an office worker does cn be done faster with the keyboard if they would learn.
In the 90's I got hired as a company to do some clipper to VB conversion. While there, I noticed the data enteery people complaining bitterly about the new software. How it killed there performance and they were pushing to go back to the mainframe.
Being a nosy problem solver, I asked them to show me why it sucked. It turns out a previous employee had rewritten the data entry system to be MOUSE DRIVEN only. her s a quote I dug out of the email to the manager "Because that's the way everyone does it."
Now , here are some numbers:
They had basically 2 forms. 1 took 7 seconds to enter undet the mainfram, the other too 9 seconds.
The new system took over a minute for either one. This was data entry softeare, and that is all these people did, enter data.
Needless to say, they were falling behind. The oonly thing helping was the top 2 data entry people would use the mainframe system and not tell anyone. They went so far as to position there workstations so no one could see they weren't using the new software.
Needless to say, that was apalling.
So I went to the manager, and told him I could improve thing with about a weeks work. He went ballistic. To the point where I just walked away. scream cussing, the works. I don't take that in the work enviroment.
So the next day, I came in wearing a suit,went to the presidents office, and ecplained to him what as happening, how muxh time was being lost, and the fact that everyone was afraid of the manager.
He called that manager in and quitely ripped him a new one. It was a site to behold.
By the end of the week, the system was completly fnctional without touching a mouse. The data entry people loved me, and the President offered me a management oppostunity;which I past on. That place was ready to implode, and it was ythe late 90s, so I left for 40% more money, and office, and stock options which would be most valuable as toilet paper.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
http colon slash slash slash dot dot org slash enter?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
would bring this idea to the mainstream user. the hotkey dialogue is, true, usually too hard to bring up in most applications, but using the optimus keyboard it would vastly improve keyboard usability.
It is amazing what the right input device can do for user experience. If you love Google Earth (or if you do a lot of CAD), you should do yourself a favor and get a 6-degree-of-freedom input device (for about $60). It makes using Google Earth with a mouse feel like using OSX with a keyboard.
Wait, I've used this! I think it was WordPerfect circa 1989?
You start out with a blue screen of death and no visual cues whatsoever. You then hit function keys and hold down alt and ctl keys until something vaguely menu-like comes up. No, it's not F1, try again. You then get big massive plastic templates to remind you of all the rarely used keys. Rubber cement it to the keyboard, along with a myriad of other such helpful devices.
Sure, it took weeks to get up to speed and some tasks might never be discovered, but if you found them it was like your own special easter egg. Man, I miss those days of keyboard driven menus...
Actually, no. No I don't. Not even a little!
Also, the mouse has this funny little wobble. Has anyone else noticed it? You start moving the mouse twards a button. Mouse moves way past it. You move the mouse back. It goes past the button the other way. Since I am trying to work fast, the mouse wobbles. This slows down the work. Keys don't wobble. I always want to move the mouse fast, and this is too fast.
I noticed that some people move the mouse sooooo agonizingly slooooow. The good part of that is that they don't miss the button.
My first sig: "Hello, World"
Especially if you buy a lot of Earl Grey tea!
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Problem is, no one, clear good method of using touch as the primary input method has presented itself...until now.
Except that it has been in use in common point-of-sale machines for, oh, about twenty years. The problem is there is no force feedback, which for the act of "typing" is useful not just in the ways that prompted engineers to put hammers inside the keyboards of IBM 3278s or deliberately add the obnoxious "click" to the Model M, namely to indicate successful input. Try to "type" on your desktop all day long. After you've shattered your nails and are soaking your bruised fingertips in ice water, the idea of a flat, rigid, unmoving surface for keyboarding will lose a bit of its appeal.
...I trade off throughout the day. Was kind of tough at first but after a week its natural. Don't bother with switching the mouse buttons...the wetware remaps that easily enough.
Disney's misuse of mice dates back to at least 1928. But over the past few decades, Disney hasn't been misusing mice as much as misusing politicians to protect its exclusive rights to mice.
Please, Farfour Mouse, be not quite dead.
Let's expand on it a little further, though. Instead of a cumbersome, resource intensive pop-up menu, let's just print all of the keyboard shortcuts on a little card to stick at the top of the monitor! Or maybe some enterprising soul will market a transparent keyboard overlay with all those shortcut keys printed on it so you can just look down at the keyboard to find those things. /sarc
Did the OP even know what a computer *was* before Windows or MacOS came out? He suggests almost exactly the system utilized by pre-windows MSWord, WordPerfect, Lotus, AppleWorks, etc, but with a pretty overlay. It was supplanted by mouse-based GUIs because they are easier to learn and more intuitive to use. Those of us who used keyboard shortcuts back when they were the only option still use them now. Those who take the time to learn them are more efficient by consequence. Newer computer users, those less comfortable with their operations, do things the longer-but-easier way.
Forgive me for not being appropriately shocked.
And hide the duct tape.
Have gnu, will travel.
Yeah, that's the first thing I noticed, too. Actually, I read through the post without thinking much of it, because I used this neat little decoder thing I have, called 'my brain' to understand what he was saying, then noticed people were making fun of him, THEN went back and checked.
In Mexico I learned Spanish being made fun of the whole time, and I think it's probably natural. The posters could have said something constructive and without malice, though.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
1. Tell people "arcane keyboard shortcuts are so 70's"
2. Develop crazy-talented 12-button mice that flash colors and have sexy names like "raz0r"
3. Convince people that their former hella-expensive customized James Bond mice suck and that they should be using arcane keyboard shortcuts.
4. Profit!!!!!
I for one welcome our new rodent overlords.
My company uses SAP R/3. When it was first implemented, we were using a GUI around version 4.xx or so. I can't remember specifically. For those unfamiliar with the old GUI or SAP, every screen was accessible through either the pull down file menu or what is known as a fast path, a four or five character name for a particular function. With a few exceptions, you never really had to use a mouse. Then came the millennium upgrades. The GUI for versions 6.xx was redone such that everything was accessible through a tree instead of the pull down menu. The rest of the GUI was prettied up with animations and other features to help those less computer savvy. The fast paths were still there, but I disliked them for other reasons. The tree was usable with just the keyboard. But it was made such that mouse manipulation was preferable. You could still revert back to the old pull down menu through a tedious process that involved opening and closing screens in a particular way and order. But it was wasteful as in the time it would take to revert, you could already be running the query/function. It was hardly convenient if you had to move from workstation to workstation or log in repeatedly. Add the point, hunt and peck, click, point, hunt and peck, click method many use for data entry and you have greatly reduced efficiency. I tend to have a hot or cold approach to such things. Either make it uniformly difficult so the user has to actually learn what it is they are doing. Or make it mind numbingly simple with giant letters and iconified buttons where all they have to do is point and click. I've always thought mice were for games anyway.
Someone hates these cans.
There is a mouseless browsing extension for firefox that works well for the 1.5.x versions. Control number goes to the desired field.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
First there were CLI editors like ed and they were bad
Then came the came the command sequence editor like vi and they were Ok
Then came the hot key editors like WordStar and they were Wonderful
Then came the full on GUI ediors and they are All flash and no dash
Next the hot key editors returned in the form of Joe and others and they are Ideal
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
You're spot on. Watch any professional Photoshopper. I work in advertising and *all* Photoshoppers work like that. They will always have one hand on the mouse and the other on the keyboard, using the mouse to do their magic and switch tools and enter parameters with the other hand. I once had a coworker who was *incredible* in Photoshop, and watching him was an enlightening experience. If he'd need to draw a path, he'd use the Alt, Ctrl and Apple keys to change bezier dot types on the fly and be done with the most complicated paths in seconds even good people would need several minutes for.
Then again, people marvel at me when they see me debugging code on the fly, switching between several applications on several screens, and I don't use the mouse at all for that. So what's most efficient differs a huge deal from task to task. That's why designing a UI is so damn hard. It must be usable for all types of crowds from the "what is this foot pedal for?" camp to the shortcut-fu types. IMO, Linux and OSX are best here, stressing different aspects, though.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
One huge exception for me is entering data in spreadsheets. Once I locate my initial cell with mouse (and yes I know of the End-Arrow sequence), I generally don't use the mouse until I finish the stack of data-entry paperwork.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
...that I need to stop using the On-screen keyboard and start using all 10 fingers?
www.purevolume.com/martyd
In fact, I generally find that the MS Windows interface is better designed for the keyboard. It just seems more responsive.
In comparison, I use KDE, which is supposed to be designed for the keyboard, too. The K-Menu is navigable by typing the name of the desired entry, or I can launch Katapult with Alt-Space and then type in the name of the program to launch, and every key is configurable, so that I can bind TWO keyboard shortcuts to an action (such as Ctrl-C or Alt-Insert for copy), and those shortcuts can even be multi-key, so that my "Copy Date" shortcut is "Win+C" then "D" whereas my "Copy Time" shortcut is "Win+C" then "T".
The problem, I suspect, is not so much with KDE as with X11. It takes so frick'n LONG for it to respond to a keypress! So, if I want to quickly: 1) Summon the Katapult menu with Win+Space, 2) type "FIR" then "Enter" to call up Firefox, and 3) maximize the window with Alt-Space X, then what happens instead is:
The entire response of X is just so sluggish that I can't get the keyboard to respond to me, and I find myself missing very much the keyboard response of Win2k, where I would rapidly type out a stream of keystrokes that would open new programs like a text editor. By the time the text editor window appeared, I'd be halfway through my first sentence already, but that sentence would appear in a burst in the editor window; the kyestrokes would be captured and delivered to the right application, not like X/KDE where the old application catches them because the new application hasn't yet started up.
Extremely frustrating. Any ideas, anyone?
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
First there were CLI editors like TECO and they were Ok
... sucky.
Then came the came the command sequence editor like vi and they were good.
Then came the hot key editors like Emacs and WordStar and they were
Then came the command style editors like Brief and Elvis, and they were good again
And then came nvi and it was excellent
And that's really the end of the line.
"I challenge you to find a hundredth as many Graphic Artists who prefer the keyboard as who prefer the mouse when either will perform a given action."
r /keyboard-shortcuts.htmlu ts-glance_ shortcuts.htmla tsheet.htmll .php?url=shortcut
http://www.photoshopsupport.com/tutorials/jennife
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/photoshop-shortc
http://www.heathrowe.com/tuts/shortcuts.asp
http://user.fundy.net/morris/?photoshop01.shtml
http://www.zenhaiku.com/archives/useful_photoshop
http://www.creativetechs.com/iq/photoshop_cs2_che
http://www.spoono.com/photoshop/tutorials/tutoria
Yeah and sneaker-netting files about the office is going to take off in a big way again.
The canon cat did the interface right.
Whenever I'm on laptops, I find myself using my left hand for keyboard shortcuts, and my right for the touchpad; if I need to type, it's not a far move for my mouse-hand, and on Mac OS X, many shortcuts are accessible on the left homerow.
It's a decent compromise.
How can you trust any article on usability that has a style sheet which starts out with...
Tiny, grey text! Now, that's what I call a new interface paradigm!
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
this article is bull****
"Try entering text with a mouse sometime... it goes something like this:"
No harder than using the stylus on a Palm PDA.
after a for example a ctrl-k (with a configurable timeout) the ctrl-k choices menu would appear.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordstar
There are other options - touchscreens map inherently to the data on the screen, but they are unreliable or costly. So that makes technology from Hitachi very interesting - a passive touchscreen that just uses ordinary transistors to detect where you put your finger - nothing to wear out, and can be added to ANY LCD screen (PC, TV or mobile phone) There's a demo at www.flaherty.co.uk (hope that's OK)
The Embedded Blog at www.flaherty.co.uk
Painful is trying to use a standard mouse for manipulating a 3D environment (Catia, I'm looking at you). Catia really hurts; center click pans, center held down and right held down rotates (in a very awkward, non-intuitive fashion), but if you release the right button, then it becomes zoom. What ends up happening is that, to look at a separate part of your assembly from a different angle, you make something like eight repetitive mouse motions and about thirty clicks. You want carpal tunnel?
The answer, of course, is the spacemouse. You do all the view manipulation with a 6-dof "puck" leaving the mouse free to select graphical objects. Result is faster, less frustrating, and more precise work. And your wrist doesn't kill you at the end of the day.
The interface in Rhino isn't as bad; you can program keyboard shortcuts, and repeated commands can be issues
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
Abolish mouse-duped functions to free up screen real estate.
Isn't this what has been happening with Microsoft since the release of IE7 and the subsequent release of Vista.
The result, of course, is navigational confusion. I'm used to pressing alt to access menu's but many people I know that have used IE7 and Vista have found problems as nothing actually states that you need a special key press to access the menu functions.
Biomech
I agree with the general idea that the mouse is often used where keyboard would be better. However, the mouse is great for certain things, so it's good to make maximum use of both input devices at the same time. A part of the solution for me is to mouse with my 'wrong' hand.
The right hand is more dexterous (pun intended), so it might as well stay on the keyboard all the time. Incidentally, the left hand is more spatially oriented, since it's connected to the right hemisphere -- every guitarist can witness this. Left mousing will feel weird at first, but you get used to it in a few minutes.
As a neat side effect, a mouse on the left is now closer to the active typing area of the keyboard. It's less of a reach overall, and easier to move your left hand back to the keyb (e.g. for touch typing).
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The rich depth of this type of object oriented approach is what I miss most about OS/2 and the better written native apps that were designed to take advantage of such features. I have become really fond of GNU/Linux for many reasons, philosophical, stability, security, flexibility, performance, new hardware support, value and even some interface features like the extensive and powerful CLI/terminal tools. Add these to the fact that IBM failed to keep OS/2 current all the while dragging users and developers along with expensive teases and there is no way I would ever go back. However OS/2 did have a elegance in some areas of the user interface that has never been matched, though KDE is getting pretty dang close.
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew