Re:Software for Mac - 3 Button Mice - Design
on
Apple Dumps the Cube
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· Score: 1
Actually, as a Mac user at home (and now only at home, now that I lost my Powerbook after a breaking and entering robbery) and general interface snob, I must admit that the scroll wheel is an absolutely fantastic addition to the mouse. I also must agree with the earlier post that the much maligned single mouse button is typically good enough for most tasks performed by casual users. Maybe Apple should offer a mouse (made out of Lucite or bright translucent plastic so it looks like a half-eaten Jolly Rancher candy, naturaly) with just a wheel that clicks as the single mouse button. I only use the wheel-click in one application on the PC, 3D Studio MAX. Other times, it gets in the way.
The article "exposes" nothing. It is a poorly researched opinion piece. It is bursting with unsubstantiated facts and inferences, but no real content. Take a look at the bibliography -- all the books were produced by anti-ADD/anti-psychopharmacology groups or predate the recognition of ADD as a disorder by several decades... not exactly material that exposes anything.
Well, even though I'm a Mac user (although I run too many other operating systems at home to be a full-fledged zealot), I thought the system stank. I know why it does what it does, and why that's a good thing, but it's the interface that was never too great. The no-eject-button and drag-to-trash thing should have been gotten rid of as soon as Macs had hard drives, since it is a atavism from the days of the OS being on the floppy disk. They should have put a button next to the drive that sends the disk eject event... the OS could handle all the file closing and dismounting and such. The same goes for CDs and Zips in modern Macs.
Looks awful? Do you mean all that brightly colored spraypaint and the doodads left about? I thought that was just a hardware implementation of the Windows XP interface.
This looks a lot like stuff that Apple prototyped years ago under the codename "Juggernaut." It was a cool idea, but they never really went anywhere with it.
As cool as it is, the theory that oil is inorganic and of possibly extraterrestrial origin has yet to really be proved. Natural gas and coal, on the other hand, are of biological origin.
It would be a fantastic scientific discovery if oil were found on the moon... one of those few and far between "this changes everything" moments. We have evidence of fairly complex hydrocarbons in space, but oil would be another matter entirely. I'm sincerely dubious, but I won't dismiss the idea until someone digs a deep enough hole on the moon.
He was alive at the time. I'm not sure whether or not it was Sagan being a butthead or just not understanding things. His lawsuit was based on the idea that Apple was going to be selling a product with his name, which he did not endorse. "Sagan" was only the codename, but it had been leaked and widely published, so one could understand the misunderstanding.
OT: That's not to say that Carl wasn't prone to buttheadism. My brother, who went to Cornell, told me a story about him. Carl Sagan lived next door to a frat, and one night the fratboys invited him to dinner. He came and they all had a grand ol' time. A few weeks later, the frat received a letter from Mr. Sagan. What they assumed was a thank-you note turned out to be a very large bill for the 'speaking engagement.'
A better way of putting it...
on
OS X
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· Score: 1
OS X recognized and allowed me to use both buttons and the wheel on my Logitech USB mouse right out of the box. No additional drivers to install.
You could say just as acurately that the Mac supports a one-button mouse. How many other OSes can?
(That last comment is paraphrased from someone else's/. post from a while back. Credit for the witicism goes to whoever made the remark.)
A plastic superconductor is cool, yes, but 'scary?' I can see how something like infinitely scalable quantum computers might be a little scary, simply because of the potentially mind-boggling computing power and the fundamental changes that would follow. A plastic superconductor -- a different twist on an existing technology -- doesn't baffle me with possibilities. All I can see are the cool potentials, like flexible superconductive cabling, or the cost of manufacturing superconductors being low enough to offset their maintenance (i.e., keeping 'em cold).
Actually, I'm basing my statements on the STAR and Macintosh design documents themselves. I think I've still got (incomplete) photocopies of them somewhere. CHI was one of the things I studied in school. The two are very different.
The Apple Lisa GUI, on the other hand, was nearly identical to that of STAR. Maybe that's what you're thinking about.
STAR was, I believe, Smalltalk-based, so it did use OOP. I never heard the claim that Jobs invented OOP, though. I own a Mac and like it, and even I'm not ready to swallow that.
Well, to the best of my knowledge, that's not quite true. Jobs et al were given a demo of various things when they visited Xerox PARC, including a defunt project called STAR. This was Xerox' GUI-based workstation. It was moderately primitive, and cost far too much to put into production. It really got Jobs turned on, though.
Shortly thereafter, with millions of dollars of Xerox investment cash and a bunch of former Xerox engineers, the Macintosh project was launched at Apple. A lot of the STAR concepts were reworked at Apple, and a lot more put in -- overlapping rectangular windows, pull-down and pop-up menus, a (semi) direct representation of the filesystem, et cetera. The modern mouse design (well, the modern mouse with a ball in the bottom) came directly from Apple. It was much more robust than the Xerox design, and it cost nearly 1/8th as much to produce. {Insert one-button joke here}
It hardly seems like a theft to me. STAR was a dumped project, and Xerox gave a whole lot of money to Apple at the beginning of the Macintosh project. Sounds more like an investment to me. If I found out someone had ripped me off, I certainly wouldn't give them money afterwards.
Microsoft's adoption of the mouse and GUI occurred later, and aped an existing, "live" product. I see that as a big difference. It wasn't exactly a ripoff of Apple or Xerox -- they were taking a risk -- but not as big a risk as Apple did.
From what I can tell, MacOS 9.1 is basically a transitional release between the "old" MacOS and MacOS X. Most notably (and a little annoyingly), it moved my Applications and Utilities folders into one called "Applications (MacOS 9.1)". I can only assume that this is how MacOS X will separate old apps from new ones.
It's a good thing that aliases on the Mac are dynamic. The OS installer moved things around, but all my handy "shortcuts" and installed applications still work fine.
That picture shows the NeXT style folder browser with the Internet Explorer application selected. That's why it has the big logo and the name in the title bar.
Personally, I don't think I'd like my folder browser changing names on me, particularly if I had more than one open. At least not completely. Maybe it'll be an option. Even MS Windows Explorer keeps "Exploring - " in the window title.
If this system works like previous attempts at treating ADD/ADHD and other attentional problems via EEG biofeedback, it works by monitoring the ratio between the patient's beta and theta activity levels. An attentive state is typically characterized by a beta/theta ratio of less than one. Such systems typically produced visual output (graphs for adults, a simple video game for children), and over time the patient learns how to produce the desired ratio. A decade ago, I was a subject in a semi-experimental setup like this. After a few weeks, I had some limited success in consciously adjusting on-screen graphs.
There's a big problem with it, however: it doesn't really work very well. The beta/theta ratio is characteristic of concentration, but it isn't itself concentration. While the patients can learn to manipulate this ratio, they're only learning to ape the symptoms of being attentive.
If it is made up, they've done a damned good job of it. They've got drugs that remove the symptoms for those who display them, but don't do an equivilant job on those who don't.
The majority of current adults with ADD were not told "from childhood" that we needed drugs; in fact, the condition wasn't recognized until relatively recently. The only thing I grew up being told was that I was lazy or stupid. The battery of (largely unpleasant) physical and psychological exams denied both of those assertations.
And regarding the recurring theme of describing being on various medications as being in a "drugged state," I must disagree. That description brings to mind being stoned or tripping or doing the Thorazine Shuffle. If Ritalin or Adderal or whatnot is doing its job, the direct effect is subtle. My first time on Ritalin, I didn't believe it was doing anything... I could feel that I was able to concentrate with ease and think more clearly, bit I felt that I was just doing it on my own. I took myself off of the drug, and it mysteriously became increasingly more and more difficult to focus as I had while on it.
Plus, there is more to ADD/ADHD than a short attention span... it is more fundamental than that. The attention span problem is just a symptom; the most obvious one, but only part of the problem. Unfortunately, it is part of the disorder's name, so it gets too much attention.
Do you believe in other learning disabilities?
on
Video Games and ADD
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· Score: 1
You could ask the same question as whether there is a difference between dyslexia and being stupid. Is the hang-up that there is a chemical treatment for ADHD and not for other LDs?
I do not know how ADD/ADHD is diagnosed nowadays. For me, in the years before they came up with a name for it, I went through a lot of physical exams, intelligence tests, psychiatric evaluation and EEGs. It was baffling; I was physically sound, at least moderately sane, and I had a high IQ according to the tests. Eventually, research began to show that certain children showed marked attentional problems with predictable symptoms, and later research suggested that it didn't always go away at puberty. It wasn't that the disorder didn't exist before the last few decades, it was misdiagnosed as various other things: chronic discipline problems, Tourette's syndrome, low intelligence, et cetera. Most "new" afflictions are just pre-existing but unrecognized conditions.
Is Ritalin a cure? No; it is a treatment, and it has its drawbacks. As I said, people with ADD/ADHD do not get the classic stimulant buzz from Ritalin, but we still get the side effects: loss of appetite, stomach complaints, high blood pressure, nervousness, et cetera. Each dose only lasts three hours, too.
Does ADD/ADHD exist? Definitely. Is is overdiagnosed? Probably. I think fewer people have it than are being treated for it. I blame the HMO system. A kid has attention problems, so you put them on speed. Someone with ADD will not get a buzz off of Ritalin, but someone without it will feel like they've had a half-dozen cups of coffee. The doctor asks the wired kid if they're doing better, and of course they say that they feel more productive than ever. The kid is rushed out of the office. Case closed.
In short, there really is such a thing as ADD/ADHD; people with it respond well to Ritalin, and ADD/ADHD is very likely overdiagnosed. But it is real. If I could let you spend a few hours in my brain, you'd believe it.
AFAIK, having been a semi-experimental subject in exactly this sort of EEG biofeedback method of treatment, it simply doesn't work.
It is based on the observation that a state of "attention" is characterized by a ratio of beta waves to theta waves less than 1. The mistake made is assuming that if you can train someone to actively lower the ratio into that range, then they'll have been trained to concentrate. The beta/theta ratio is a symptom of attentitiveness, but it is apparently not the cause.
Frankly, I'm dubious of this announcement. A completely keyboardless computer has too many drawbacks that would make it difficult for day-to-day work. It also sounds like a warmed-over version of Apple's aborted Juggernaut project, which featured a modular computer that housed most of the hardware in a LCD screen that could be operated as a slate notebook. A lot of bogus "news reports" from different hardware manufacturers feature exclusive photos of prototype hardware -- from five or six years ago.
However, a notebook computer that operated as a keyboardless slate would be excellent. Have you ever tried using a regular notebook while standing (and, no, not standing over a desk on which the notebook is sitting)? It's nearly impossible; you have to balance the thing in one palm while doing the old hunt-n-peck with the other hand. A notebook with a detachable keyboard (or, preferably, one that folded back behind the screen, a little like that high-end WinCE one a while back) would be great for quick jotting and note-taking, like writing on a clipboard. It would also make diagramming a piece of cake. The mouse is a lousy input device for drawing, IMHO. I use a drawing tablet for some of my work, and going back and forth between that and the keyboard is a pain in the ass.
Pen and voice input could definately be used more and better than they currently are, especially in conjunction with a keyboard. There have been so many times I've wanted to have a little Graphitti floater on-screen so I can execute the occasional keystroke when I'm using a tablet. Tablets, however, are almost exclusively seen as computer illustrator's tools and support for them has matched that preconception. If Apple puts a decent pen-based input device in a general-purpose notebook, there will potentially be a lot more interest in developing for non-keyboard, non-mouse input interfaces.
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Actually, as a Mac user at home (and now only at home, now that I lost my Powerbook after a breaking and entering robbery) and general interface snob, I must admit that the scroll wheel is an absolutely fantastic addition to the mouse. I also must agree with the earlier post that the much maligned single mouse button is typically good enough for most tasks performed by casual users. Maybe Apple should offer a mouse (made out of Lucite or bright translucent plastic so it looks like a half-eaten Jolly Rancher candy, naturaly) with just a wheel that clicks as the single mouse button. I only use the wheel-click in one application on the PC, 3D Studio MAX. Other times, it gets in the way.
The article "exposes" nothing. It is a poorly researched opinion piece. It is bursting with unsubstantiated facts and inferences, but no real content. Take a look at the bibliography -- all the books were produced by anti-ADD/anti-psychopharmacology groups or predate the recognition of ADD as a disorder by several decades... not exactly material that exposes anything.
Well, even though I'm a Mac user (although I run too many other operating systems at home to be a full-fledged zealot), I thought the system stank. I know why it does what it does, and why that's a good thing, but it's the interface that was never too great. The no-eject-button and drag-to-trash thing should have been gotten rid of as soon as Macs had hard drives, since it is a atavism from the days of the OS being on the floppy disk. They should have put a button next to the drive that sends the disk eject event... the OS could handle all the file closing and dismounting and such. The same goes for CDs and Zips in modern Macs.
Looks awful? Do you mean all that brightly colored spraypaint and the doodads left about? I thought that was just a hardware implementation of the Windows XP interface.
This looks a lot like stuff that Apple prototyped years ago under the codename "Juggernaut." It was a cool idea, but they never really went anywhere with it.
It would be a fantastic scientific discovery if oil were found on the moon... one of those few and far between "this changes everything" moments. We have evidence of fairly complex hydrocarbons in space, but oil would be another matter entirely. I'm sincerely dubious, but I won't dismiss the idea until someone digs a deep enough hole on the moon.
OT: That's not to say that Carl wasn't prone to buttheadism. My brother, who went to Cornell, told me a story about him. Carl Sagan lived next door to a frat, and one night the fratboys invited him to dinner. He came and they all had a grand ol' time. A few weeks later, the frat received a letter from Mr. Sagan. What they assumed was a thank-you note turned out to be a very large bill for the 'speaking engagement.'
You could say just as acurately that the Mac supports a one-button mouse. How many other OSes can?
(That last comment is paraphrased from someone else's /. post from a while back. Credit for the witicism goes to whoever made the remark.)
A plastic superconductor is cool, yes, but 'scary?' I can see how something like infinitely scalable quantum computers might be a little scary, simply because of the potentially mind-boggling computing power and the fundamental changes that would follow. A plastic superconductor -- a different twist on an existing technology -- doesn't baffle me with possibilities. All I can see are the cool potentials, like flexible superconductive cabling, or the cost of manufacturing superconductors being low enough to offset their maintenance (i.e., keeping 'em cold).
The Apple Lisa GUI, on the other hand, was nearly identical to that of STAR. Maybe that's what you're thinking about.
STAR was, I believe, Smalltalk-based, so it did use OOP. I never heard the claim that Jobs invented OOP, though. I own a Mac and like it, and even I'm not ready to swallow that.
Shortly thereafter, with millions of dollars of Xerox investment cash and a bunch of former Xerox engineers, the Macintosh project was launched at Apple. A lot of the STAR concepts were reworked at Apple, and a lot more put in -- overlapping rectangular windows, pull-down and pop-up menus, a (semi) direct representation of the filesystem, et cetera. The modern mouse design (well, the modern mouse with a ball in the bottom) came directly from Apple. It was much more robust than the Xerox design, and it cost nearly 1/8th as much to produce. {Insert one-button joke here}
It hardly seems like a theft to me. STAR was a dumped project, and Xerox gave a whole lot of money to Apple at the beginning of the Macintosh project. Sounds more like an investment to me. If I found out someone had ripped me off, I certainly wouldn't give them money afterwards.
Microsoft's adoption of the mouse and GUI occurred later, and aped an existing, "live" product. I see that as a big difference. It wasn't exactly a ripoff of Apple or Xerox -- they were taking a risk -- but not as big a risk as Apple did.
It's a good thing that aliases on the Mac are dynamic. The OS installer moved things around, but all my handy "shortcuts" and installed applications still work fine.
That picture shows the NeXT style folder browser with the Internet Explorer application selected. That's why it has the big logo and the name in the title bar.
Personally, I don't think I'd like my folder browser changing names on me, particularly if I had more than one open. At least not completely. Maybe it'll be an option. Even MS Windows Explorer keeps "Exploring - " in the window title.
If this system works like previous attempts at treating ADD/ADHD and other attentional problems via EEG biofeedback, it works by monitoring the ratio between the patient's beta and theta activity levels. An attentive state is typically characterized by a beta/theta ratio of less than one. Such systems typically produced visual output (graphs for adults, a simple video game for children), and over time the patient learns how to produce the desired ratio. A decade ago, I was a subject in a semi-experimental setup like this. After a few weeks, I had some limited success in consciously adjusting on-screen graphs.
There's a big problem with it, however: it doesn't really work very well. The beta/theta ratio is characteristic of concentration, but it isn't itself concentration. While the patients can learn to manipulate this ratio, they're only learning to ape the symptoms of being attentive.
The majority of current adults with ADD were not told "from childhood" that we needed drugs; in fact, the condition wasn't recognized until relatively recently. The only thing I grew up being told was that I was lazy or stupid. The battery of (largely unpleasant) physical and psychological exams denied both of those assertations.
And regarding the recurring theme of describing being on various medications as being in a "drugged state," I must disagree. That description brings to mind being stoned or tripping or doing the Thorazine Shuffle. If Ritalin or Adderal or whatnot is doing its job, the direct effect is subtle. My first time on Ritalin, I didn't believe it was doing anything... I could feel that I was able to concentrate with ease and think more clearly, bit I felt that I was just doing it on my own. I took myself off of the drug, and it mysteriously became increasingly more and more difficult to focus as I had while on it.
Plus, there is more to ADD/ADHD than a short attention span... it is more fundamental than that. The attention span problem is just a symptom; the most obvious one, but only part of the problem. Unfortunately, it is part of the disorder's name, so it gets too much attention.
I do not know how ADD/ADHD is diagnosed nowadays. For me, in the years before they came up with a name for it, I went through a lot of physical exams, intelligence tests, psychiatric evaluation and EEGs. It was baffling; I was physically sound, at least moderately sane, and I had a high IQ according to the tests. Eventually, research began to show that certain children showed marked attentional problems with predictable symptoms, and later research suggested that it didn't always go away at puberty. It wasn't that the disorder didn't exist before the last few decades, it was misdiagnosed as various other things: chronic discipline problems, Tourette's syndrome, low intelligence, et cetera. Most "new" afflictions are just pre-existing but unrecognized conditions.
Is Ritalin a cure? No; it is a treatment, and it has its drawbacks. As I said, people with ADD/ADHD do not get the classic stimulant buzz from Ritalin, but we still get the side effects: loss of appetite, stomach complaints, high blood pressure, nervousness, et cetera. Each dose only lasts three hours, too.
Does ADD/ADHD exist? Definitely. Is is overdiagnosed? Probably. I think fewer people have it than are being treated for it. I blame the HMO system. A kid has attention problems, so you put them on speed. Someone with ADD will not get a buzz off of Ritalin, but someone without it will feel like they've had a half-dozen cups of coffee. The doctor asks the wired kid if they're doing better, and of course they say that they feel more productive than ever. The kid is rushed out of the office. Case closed.
In short, there really is such a thing as ADD/ADHD; people with it respond well to Ritalin, and ADD/ADHD is very likely overdiagnosed. But it is real. If I could let you spend a few hours in my brain, you'd believe it.
AFAIK, having been a semi-experimental subject in exactly this sort of EEG biofeedback method of treatment, it simply doesn't work. It is based on the observation that a state of "attention" is characterized by a ratio of beta waves to theta waves less than 1. The mistake made is assuming that if you can train someone to actively lower the ratio into that range, then they'll have been trained to concentrate. The beta/theta ratio is a symptom of attentitiveness, but it is apparently not the cause.
However, a notebook computer that operated as a keyboardless slate would be excellent. Have you ever tried using a regular notebook while standing (and, no, not standing over a desk on which the notebook is sitting)? It's nearly impossible; you have to balance the thing in one palm while doing the old hunt-n-peck with the other hand. A notebook with a detachable keyboard (or, preferably, one that folded back behind the screen, a little like that high-end WinCE one a while back) would be great for quick jotting and note-taking, like writing on a clipboard. It would also make diagramming a piece of cake. The mouse is a lousy input device for drawing, IMHO. I use a drawing tablet for some of my work, and going back and forth between that and the keyboard is a pain in the ass.
Pen and voice input could definately be used more and better than they currently are, especially in conjunction with a keyboard. There have been so many times I've wanted to have a little Graphitti floater on-screen so I can execute the occasional keystroke when I'm using a tablet. Tablets, however, are almost exclusively seen as computer illustrator's tools and support for them has matched that preconception. If Apple puts a decent pen-based input device in a general-purpose notebook, there will potentially be a lot more interest in developing for non-keyboard, non-mouse input interfaces.